Hollywood Word Project

This weekend, my roommate Wendy and I decided to finally add some decor to our barren living room. We browsed for an hour or so through all our decorating pins on Pinterest and finally decided on one. 

I call it, out Hollywood Word Project!

This is the original pin photo

So, having just moved in, we had tons of boxes just lying around the house. It seemed fitting that we would choose a project that was cheap (cause lets face it, we broke!) and could utilize things we had around the house.

Aside from the lights, we had everything to complete this project.

1- Cut up the boxes and form the letters. Duct tape or masking tape is a must for this step. Forget glue until later. It helped when we found a box that was generally equally proportioned and most of our letters were made from that.

2- Make the letters 3D. You can't really tell from my picture, but the filling of the F is not at the back of the letter, but in the middle of the walls...if that makes sense. Just think of it as, you have to poke lights through it, so you'll need room to hide them behind the letter and you also need space in the front of the letter to give a glowing effect. (I think I may have just confused myself haha)

3- Spray paint your letters, or paint with craft paint. I sprayed the walls of the letters black so that they would match with anything else we put in the living room.

4- Get a backing. In the original pin, they did not do this. We improvised a little. We grabbed a bunch of our left over boxes and made a backing for our letters to hang on. We covered that backing with poster board and then sprayed the whole thing silver to make the letters pop.

5- Punch holes in your letters. This is where your lights will go through. I had to tape the back of every light so that they wouldn't fall out. It took some time, so be patient.

6- Glue the letters to the board. We used hot glue and it has held up well. I hot glued the crap out of that thing!

7- (This step is completely optional) String the lights around the board. We had so many lights left over that we had enough to border the board. I taped them on and then sprayed the cord. This was a lot of work because I had to put tape over every light. But it was worth it! All the cord is silver and it matches.

8- "Frost" your letters. The pin calls for tracing paper, but we only had tissue paper. The point is, you don't want people seeing all the cords and the actual lights, so we put tissue paper over the letters. It gives it a nice frosted look when you turn the lights on.

9- FINAL STEP. Hang it up. This step took 3 people, including myself. Since it's all made from cardboard, its a little flimsy, so I had two of my friends support it while I hammered it into the wall. 

Viola! Your own personalized Hollywood worthy sign.

This can be made to say anything you want it to say! That's the cool thing about it. 

All in all this project cost us $4! We already had some spray paint from another project we'd worked on before and we, of course, had the boxes. All we had to buy were the lights, which right after Christmas, everything was 75% off!

We improvised a lot of this (because we can't do anything the easy way). The original tutorial has a few different steps, but after all is said and done, it looks awesome!

Our project took us a few days, but we took a lot of breaks and watched a movie as we did this haha. It will definitely take some time. And can I just say, it is much too cold outside right now to be spray-painting!

You can view the original tutorial here

Happy crafting.

If anyone attempts this, I would love to hear about it!