Make your own Family Rules Sign

I recently made this piece of artwork for one of my hallways in my house. 

I saw a ton of cute family rule signs on Pinterest, but decided I wanted to make my own custom one so I could add all the phrases I liked on it. Just so you know, I am not usually very good with computery stuff... I don't even have Word on this computer.

This is how I made it, and how you can too! :) 

1) Opened Picasa and got started. If you don't have Picasa, you can download it for FREE on the internet here. It is a photo program you can edit your photos and has text you can add to your photos.

2) Took a black photo with my camera and loaded it to my computer. Picasa imported it automatically. I adjusted the color to make sure it was completely black. Note: I tried to crop a small part of a photo that had a black portion on it, but it was blurry when printed big. It worked great when I purposely took a black picture with my nice camera. I am sure you could use a phone camera, but it may not look as good if printing this photo big like I did.

3) The texts that are saved on your computer are the texts that will show up in your Picasa. I didn't love the texts that were originally on my Picasa, so I went to dafonts.com  to download some fun free fonts on my computer. I thought this was complicated to do, but it actually was super simple. Once the fonts were downloaded on my computer, they automatically loaded into Picasa.

4) I double clicked the black photo and the edit screen pops up.

5) Next, I opened the text button. This is where you can pick your font, size and color and start typing on the black photo. You can click on the phrase and move it around, angle it, whatever you would like to do....

6) I spent alot of time adding different phrases, switching out different fonts and arranging them on the page. 

 7) Then I made sure to save the picture in Picasa, and "saved as" to my desktop.

8) Printed the photo. I tried to do the "engineer prints" that everyone talks about on Pinterest, but it turned out really blurry. It may have been because I had cropped down a part of a black photo, making the resolution terrible. You can print it in any size. I printed mine as a poster - I believe it is a 16 x 20 - which I think many places will do for you. If you send in the photo to the store from online, make sure that none of your font is cut off.

And there you have it: how to make your own Family Rules sign for free and without any expensive computer software.