Picture Perfect Letters

As a teacher, I would spend literally hours cutting out letters so that they were perfect. Now, when I need some letters for a project, sign or bulletin board, I have a handy trick that works wonders and takes about 1/3 the time.  Here is how I do it.

Mama’s Directions

1. Open a word processing document.
2. Type the text you want to use.
3. Choose the font you like and enlarge the text to the size that works for your project.
4. Highlight your text, choose “outline” in your font menu. This simply saves ink when you print.
5. Add a few spaces in between each letter so they are easier to cut later.
6. Go to the print window and check the box called, “flip horizontally.” This will reverse the letters. You may also be able to flip horizontally before the print screen. On my Mac, I can do this under the “arrange” menu.  Not sure about other kinds of computers though.
7. Print on either colored or white paper. If you are using “fancy” paper that is one-sided (like a lot of scrapbooking papers) be sure you print on the WRONG side of the paper. Otherwise you will have lines on the good side and letters that are backwards. Yikes!
8. Cut out the letters along the lines.
9. Flip letters over so the lines are on the back and you have perfect letters!

Write your text, choose your font and make it the right size for your final product

Highlight your text and choose “outline” under font format

Put a few spaces between each letter to make cutting easier

Flip the letters horizontally

Cut the letters out using the lines as a guide

If you want your letters to be a certain color, glue the letters to a piece of colored paper before cutting them out.

Your final product- picture perfect letters!

Other ideas

• You can glue the letters onto tagboard, cut them out and use them for stencils.
• If you don’t have printer safe colored paper, print out the letters as stated above and then glue the papers to construction paper or other paper and cut them out. Flip the letters over and you have perfect letters on colored paper. (see orange letters above)
• If you don’t like to cut the small spaces in the letters of o, p, r, e etc, leave them as is and cut out a coordinating color or black paper to fit the shape and glue it on. Or you can color in the spaces as I did above in the orange letters.

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