Update on Origami birds and some DIY Letters *Gender Spoiler*

So I decided to update the origami birds with some numbers, circles and dots in black and red to make them more eye catching for the baby. I've heard that they see black and red first so I thought I'd go with that. I used permanent markers on the bottom of the birds and left the top the same so only the baby would see them from below. They kinda look like airplanes, lol.

The bottom one is flipped right side up so you can see the top.

***Gender spoiler alert below so if you don't want to know stop!***

I've been looking at a lot of ideas on how I wanted to put up the baby's name in the nursery. My friend Leeanne found this tutorial which looked relatively simple and cheap. I had a few boxes laying around that I could use. I printed out the baby's name in Microsoft Word using Cooper Black font. I made the text a light grey color so it wouldn't use as much ink and made the letters as big as I could while still fitting a letter per page.

Printed out name, this is our girls name. I also printed out the letters M and S for our boy name Miles (Just in case if someone was wrong, I've heard it has happened a few times! I also figured I wouldn't want to do this again lol.)

Here are the letters all cut out, I used the box cutter to cut out the middle of the A.

I taped down the letter and cut around it the first time. The tutorial said to trace first and I thought I would skip that step.

I used scissors to clean up the edges. I suck at cutting them out with the box cutter and had to pop/tear out the letters for the most part.

It ended up being easier not cutting around the paper template and cutting the traced letter! LOL. I did 2 of each letter so they would be a little thicker in the end.

This took me like 3 hours to cut them and it was a big pain in the butt. My wrist was sore the next day. It would've been easier had I picked a less rounded font.

Alice all done!

Miles all done!

I used some Elmer's stick glue I had around the house to glue the same letters together to make them thicker.

This is what it looked like after I glued them.

I picked out some scrapbook paper, girly colors for the A and C, boyish for M and S, neutral for the rest of the letters.

I used some Elmers Xtreme stick glue to glue the paper onto the letter. The box cutter helps for tight areas, like inside the A.

This shows all the cuts you have to do to make the paper wrap nicely. It's pretty time consuming! Gluing the paper on took like 3 hours. I was watching a movie and TV while I did it so maybe it would've been faster if I didn't do that.

End result for Alice.

End result for Miles.

I'm not really happy with how the M and S came out (they were the last ones I did), but since they predicted a girl I'm just going to leave it the way it is for now. If the baby ends up being a boy I'll probably just add some ribbon trim or something to fix it up.

This is what it looks like up! I thought about trimming the letters with ribbon but I think it looks great the way it is.

This is what I used to put the letters up, we'll see if they stay up, LOL. My wall is textured so it makes it more challenging to stick things  to it.

I'm keeping the gender a secret for a few people that don't want to know, hence the spoiler alert. Overall this project was pretty cheap but extremely time consuming so beware!