It all began………

When I was in the “planning stages” of Bill and my 60th birthday party.   I was looking for a way to decorate and make our  celebration special.  In the throws of constant internet searches, pinterest of course and many others,  I finally found the idea that stuck, yard signs.  Yes, yard signs.  I’m sure you’ve seen during the elections a million yard signs dotting the braver people’s yards.

Well in our case we were going to showcase pictures of ourselves on the yard signs dotting our yard through the decades.  5-10-20-30 etc up to 60! Quite excitedly I told Bill and went on and on about how the yard signs would be cheap, $.89 each, cute, unique and an easy way to decorate ha…..ha…….

MYTHS to Making CUSTOMIZED Yard Signs

This topic is not for the unambitious.  A few weeks before the party we really started to investigate making the yard signs.  A few weeks should be plenty of time in our 1 hour photo turn around world.   It is not a cheap decoration.  The $.89 yard sign was for an order of 100 yard signs of the same design.  Opppssss……we wanted 12 different pictures.

1. It is not easy.  Our pictures, many decades old needed to be scanned and put on a disk.  Since we don’t own a scanner or don’t know how to make the one we have work this was several trips to Walgreens manually scanning and editing.  Then uploading the disc.
2. Still not easy, locating photos around the house of ourselves.  I have a stack, Bill has a stack.  We found his stacks but my stacks were ??????  We looked and stopped looking and looked some more and then stopped looking.  Finally Bill found them in our oven our informal filing cabinet

   

   with a note that said S.J. photos! Voila I was able to commemorate my life now with photos.

 

 

3.  Now that the photos were on the computer it was time to order.  Again, not easy, we had a hard time getting our size, getting the format, getting just about everything so……….

Time to get creative!!!

1.  We decided to order posters, attach them to foam boards and then mount them to the wire stands that would easily push into the grass.

2.  We ordered the custom posters from Vista Print.  Complete with cute sayings.

3.  The foam board and the wire stands we ordered from Amazon.

4.  Bill got to work, cutting the foam board in half using double sticky tape to attach the posters to the foam board, then finally using duct tape to attach the foam board posters to the wire stands.  Hours of work!

WAS IT worth all the hours of work?

YES!  We had so much fun gathering the photos, reminiscing, sharing memories of our past, and having a project.  Most importantly the yard signs dotting our yard were a unique way to celebrate our lives through the decades.  Try it yourself sometime.  You could make yard signs for just about any event!