Adventures in DIY: Wedding Vow Gallery Wrapped Photo

I saw the coolest thing on Pinterest. The Etsy store, Geezee'sCustomCanvas takes photos, adds words (like your wedding vows, or the lyrics to your first dance) and prints it out onto a gallery wrapped canvas. I thought it was so cool. I wanted one. But I wanted to make it myself. :) To start the project, I found a Groupon for a great discount on a gallery wrapped photo from Picture It On Canvas. (Costco often has photo center coupons for the same service.)

Being cheap, and having a husband that loves open source software, I decided to use the free software GIMP. Photoshop would work awesomely, too, but like I said... I am cheap.

I started out by choosing the photo I wanted to add words to, and importing it into GIMP making sure to use a layout equivalent to the size of gallery wrapped photo I was going to buy. Of course, I had to pick a smoochy picture.

My husband I decided that we wanted the quote to be short and sweet, so we decided to use our wedding vows. Being extra-nerdy, I also wanted to use the fonts we chose for the wedding invitations, programs and thank you cards. I added a text box with our vows written in the more basic sans-serif font (Futura Light). I deleted a few words I wanted to emphasize and replaced the characters with spaces.

After making sure I had plenty of room for the emphasized words, I used our more fancy serif font (Citadel Script) to add our keywords of love, joy, grow and life. Each word was a different text box, in a different layer. I carefully placed each word.

Once I was happy with the placement of the words, I simply cropped it to the desired size, flattened the image and uploaded it to Picture It On Canvas. There, I had the photo gallery wrapped using a special edging that just stretched out the sides, as I used a photo that didn't leave extra room around the edges. It worked perfectly. Less than a week later my new gallery wrapped photo was happily hanging in the center of my gallery wall!