DIY: Lakewood Subway Sign Art

With so much house preparation work being done, it's hard to even think about what's going on our walls (aside from paint, of course). But since we've pretty much gathered all of the furniture and little touches we can right now, our thoughts have finally drifted towards thinking about art. We got the new Restoration Hardware catalog last week, and as it usually does, it featured these delicious vintage subway signs. Jim has actually been wanting one for a while, so it seemed the perfect time to not just get one, but make a custom one with our new street name on it!

We had the perfect frame, so within a couple hours of me agonizing over street names, typefaces, and kerning behind my laptop, we finally have our own custom print for the living room.

The original prints are longer and narrower, but I wanted to do something with a slightly different proportion. We still wanted it to be large and dramatic, which is what we loved so much about the Restoration Hardware prints. This one is sized at 18x26", and we got it printed at Kinko's for about 30 bucks. 

The vintage ones were also hand-painted, so the irregularities in the lettering would be impossible to achieve without hand drawing the whole thing. However, I think we got pretty darn close and we love the result!

I included a lot of the obvious main Lakewood streets, but chose some for variety of length or punctuation — and put in a couple neighborhood streets so ours would fit in. So, can you guess which one is our new street?!