Very clean. I know, because I spent a half hour cleaning it last night before taking this photo. I looked at the clock, and weirdly, it was time to go to bed, and I wasn’t anywhere near finished yet. (Huh? What? For sure I was going to have this done and cleaned up before bed time.)  There wasn’t an inch of table clear. (There’s a reason I’m not showing the explicit version.) I need to clean it up — I really like people to be able to eat at the table if they want to. (The plastic shreds all over the rug? No problem. No one’s going to be eating off the rug. I hope. Well, who cares? They’re not going to ruin my sign with their food by eating off the floor, are they?)

So I was a little late getting to bed, and the sign is, well, not quite finished. There’s a reason this happened. It’s the crafter thing (I blame my mother.) It’s not possible to just draw words on a sign. The words have to be just right. I have to experiment with the colors, sizes, and placement of the letters. Plus I can’t draw (sshhh… don’t tell anyone.) But I have discovered this great way to use letter-stickers even though they’re too small. I can make a nice, thick border around them, and then peel the stickers off, so there’s a high-contrast white area of perfectly formed letter inside. Am I clever, or what?

Now I’ve got it all worked out, and the sign material cut, and whoops! This plasticky stuff does not respond to Sharpies at all the way the stuff I was practicing on did. The colors are different. It smudges like crazy. The ink pools up in strange ways.

But okay, I can work with it. In fact… yes! I can use the yellow letter-stickers that I thought would be invisible against the white background. Hah! This is so great. I love the yellow. I can cover the marker bleeds, and use the yellow stickers. Yeah, me!

Oh crap. A really big BLACK smudge. Yuck. And there’s no getting it off. Because it’s Sharpie. You can’t get it off anything. Well, not unless you use something that will melt the plastic sign material. Don’t we have whiteout somewhere? No? Really?!?

Huh.

Ah-hah! I know. I have all this white sticker-paper from the letter-sticker sheets. I can cover that smudge. Don’t worry. It only took 4 tries to cut out a big enough sticker. I swear that smudge just kept growing. Even though I gave it time to dry, and washed my hands before messing with it. The smudge grew anyway. Really.

Hmmm. The yellow letters are great, but… the letters that were supposed to be red, white and blue can’t be made with yellow letters. I need white. (No, I can’t just draw them by hand. That’s why I bought all the stickers. Duh.) Hmmm… I might have a sheet of white craft foam left. Yes! A sheet and a half, almost. And yes, the marker colors look normal, and they don’t smudge. I can make letters on the foam, and cut out the foam letters and glue them on the sign. This will be so cool!

All right, so I have a plan. But before I make more letters of that size… well, I’d better make sure the words I have can be read from a reasonable distance. I mean if no one can read them, what’s the point. All right. Let’s check it out.

Oh.  Well.  The yellow letter stickers aren’t really working out so well. Hmmm. I can fix this. I know I can. Yes, that’s better. Blue… green… I can read some of them now. But the S, and that E… Oh. I know. Put the yellow back on the S. It needs the contrast. One yellow letter will be okay. And I can extend the ends of the E with cut-off bits of an I sticker. Yes, that’s not bad at all. It’s readable. More or less. It doesn’t look great, but don’t worry. I can figure out a way to fix that part later. Until then, it’ll be usable.

So here we are. A couple more evenings to work at it, and I think I’ll have a sign. Cross your fingers for me.

P.S. The reason I had time to actually write today was I somehow managed to get on the train without a crochet hook in my backpack.