A Whimsical Window

A few months ago, Mr. Lion and I went out to dinner for our last date-iversary.  After dinner, we decided to go for a little walk through the Virginia Highlands, one of my favorite areas in Atlanta.  One house that we walked by had a significant amount of trash on the curb...not garbage-trash, like we're-remodeling trash.  Among this trash was an old, rustic window.  I immediately thought of Mrs. Husky's post and the inspiration was instant.

We had planned on designing and printing programs, so we decided not to use the window for that.  However, we didn't plan on having ushers, so we could use the window for seating!  Here's the design I came up with:

Now, here's the part where I get in a little over my head.  The window is 37" x 34".  I wanted this text to fill the window.  I assumed the best way to paint the text on the window was to print and trace.  Now, maybe some of you design kids out there could have shown me an easy way to get this scaled just right, but my computer-illiterate self decided to muddle through it on my own.  What!  Mr. Lion was out of town for his bachelor party!  I had nothing better to do!

I used Keynote to design a slide, since that's what I've used to make research posters for presentations.  I opened the Inspector tab to edit the size of the slide.  In Keynote, one inch equals 72 pixels, so I did the math and created a 2664 x 2448 slide.  Then, I created a very large text block.  I mean, VERY large.  The line with "seat" was font size 400!  Then, I found a free program called PosteRazor that "tiled" images, like this:

The program then saved several 8 1/2 x 11" pdf files like this:

I cleaned the window thoroughly and got to printing.  I taped the pages, text side up, on the back of the window and traced over with a paintbrush.  This part was much more in my comfort zone than "tiling!"

 All taped up and ready to paint!

Total cost of this project?  About $2 in paint!  Totally worth stepping out of my comfort zone!  What DIY projects have taken you out of your comfort zone?