Personalized Art in 10 Minutes or Less

For a good long time I have wanted to make this monogram art that the youngsters over at Young House Love did.  I hit a few snags though.  The first was that it was last spring, and I wasn't married yet.  So we didn't even HAVE a monogram.  Feeling superstitious, I decided to wait until that day had arrived.
Fast forward to summer.  Everybody in our household now has the last initial "G".  Yay!  Except do you know what I found out?  Nobody starts magazine articles with G's!  I even had a big box full of half-cut up National Geographics that I rescued from the school, but no good G's.  *sigh*  I had to take matters into my own hands.
Enter this bad boy:

To make your own, you will need:

*a large picture frame (I scored this huge beadboard frame at Michael's in the clearance section, whee!)

*burlap (I had tons of this leftover from the wedding, so $0)

*felt (again, a wedding leftover)

*a computer and printer

I knew I wanted a typewriter-ish lowercase "g", so I hunted one down.  Then I enlarged it to something ridiculous like 750points.  I don't remember exactly, but I was going for pretty much filling the paper.  I used a word-art to make it outline only (I didn't want to use up that much ink!) and printed it out.

After carefully cutting it out, I flipped it over and traced it backwards on my felt.  I didn't want any errant pencil lines showing on the front, in case my cutting wasn't perfect - which I knew it wouldn't be.  

I cut out my felt "g", a piece of burlap bigger than my frame opening, eyeballed the "g" into the center, and sandwiched the frame all back together.  Voila!  Practically instant, personalized art.  I love it, but I am kind of a typography nerd.

My "G" pic sits on my mantel near another cheap, easy, and sentimental personalized artwork:

My husband proposed by writing "Marry me?" in the sand on Papa'iloa Beach in Hawaii.  We went back there for our honeymoon, and made sure to take another "sand graffiti" picture, with our initials and wedding date.  I simply printed the picture and popped it into a cheap Ikea shadowbox with some Hawaiian sand and coral.  Now my husband has no excuse to forget our anniversary, right? =)