I Got Crafty Again...Disney Character Name Letters :)

I made these "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse character letters" for my boyfriend's nephews 1st birthday. He is a big "fan" of the television show so I thought it would be a great addition to his cake table. These are the standard characters but if you have a longer name, you could always switch it up. There are also many variations of each character letter, these were just the ones I liked the best from all of the research I did.

First things first, you will need to gather some of the things you will be using for this craft:

• hot glue gun
• variety pack of paint brushes that include all sizes and foam brushes as well
• pencil
• scissors
• acrylic paint--the ones I got were $0.69 cents each and worked wonderfully
• ruler
• 8" paper mache letters --only craft store that had these by me was "Joanns"
• various colors of card-stock--choose the colors you will need based on the character styles you are choosing. They will be used to cut out the ears, bows, bones and hats.

Start out by drawing lines with your pencil on the letters to separate where the different colors of paint should go, think of this as a guide. I used a ruler to give me clean lines. Once this preparation is done, its on to the fun stuff, the painting!

Before painting, I suggest throwing down a plastic table cloth that can be thrown out or some newspaper to avoid mess. Grab your cup of water to clean each brush, paper towel and foam/plastic/etc. disposable plate for mixing and prepping colors. Each color shown aside from the red and black had to be custom mixed--it is so easy so don't worry :)

I find that the foam brushes worked best for covering large areas. I used the smaller brushes for crevices and detail work.

After your letters are painted (this took me a few days as I let them dry on one side first etc.), now begin decorating them. For this I went online and found outlines of a Minnie Mouse bow, a Donald Duck hat and being that I couldn't find a goofy hat, my boyfriend free-handed it :) Print these out and use them to trace on to your card-stock.

Once they are cut out just glue them onto the completely dried painted letters with your hot glue gun to make your characters come to life :) For any details on the card-stock cutouts, ex: the letters "pluto" on the bone, I just used my very fine tipped paint brush and some black paint. Also, I couldn't find the perfect (did I mention I'm quite the perfectionist when it comes to things like this?) blue for Donald's hat so I painted over the card-stock color I did find and it worked out quite well !

When I took on this craft, I thought it would be way more overwhelming than it actually was, painting and crafts for me in general are rather therapeutic. This could be why I enjoy paint by numbers so much :)

Here is how it turned out on the table. From this angle it looks blocked a little but it looked quite swell--send praises my boyfriend's sisters way, she pulled off a pretty awesome Mickey table ;)

To the Disney in all of us,

xox