Love Story Wall Hanging

For Valentines Day I got everything I needed to redo our bedroom. We had no pictures or wall hangings. A big pile of clothes to go to the thrift store. A teetering old bookshelf. A battered night stand. And white everything. I decided to jazz the place up. I had big plans. Cameron was going to leave work with everything normal and come home to an awesome dinner and a completely redone room. Well...life got crazy and then I got called in to work on Valentines Day and the day just didn't happen like I planned it. I still don't have the room finished, but I have elements of it done. I spent a lot of time on Pinterest, at our antique shops, in the craft section at Walmart (because that's all we have here other than Family Dollar), and going through various shops downtown. I came up with a good handfull of ideas for what I wanted. One idea though came from this picture I found on Pinterest: 

I thought that was really a cute idea, but I wanted it to be a little more personal than that. So I tweaked the idea a little. I wrote up our story (how we met, how we became friends, our dating story, our engagement, etc) in third person. It was really fun to go back through details of our story. It took me a few days to write it. I wanted to make sure I got it just right. 

Once I finished the story, I then used Gimp to organize the text into columns so it would fill the entire page. I knew I wanted "Every Love Story is Beautiful but Ours is my Favorite" on the page, but I didn't want it to cover up any of the words beneath. I finally figured out how to do what I wanted with layers and ended up with this:

Here's a small section of the page zoomed in so you can see how the whole story is still readable through the large words:

I printed it out 16x20 and have it in a frame all ready to go on the wall when I get the room finished up. I wasn't sure how he'd react to this...it's more sentimental than some guys like I think. But he was so sweet and excited and he seemed touched by it, which made me feel good. I'm excited to get this on the wall!