Do Your Best

If you watched Terrace House: Boys & Girls in the City, you might recognize this phrase. The cast is always encouraging each other to do your best in their work or in general. I love the phrase because man, we should all just really do our best all of the time, whatever that means to us individually.

I love the phrase so much that I wanted to see it in front of me every day. I'm not one for tattoos, so the next best thing was to make a banner that I would be forced to look at every day upon waking.

Turns out, there's a reason people charge a pretty penny to make lettered banners. They are quite tedious and difficult to get right. Ironically, I was trying to do my best at making a banner for the first time, which wasn't the world's best, but it was my best, so it all came full circle.

I based my project on these instructions, doubling the dimensions to make the banner bigger. I used tracing paper to draw the Helvetica letters, then used those as a stencil to cut out the felt letters on adhesive felt sheets.

The fabric is a black hopsack linen and I used a wooden dowel rod (any hardware store will carry these) to hang it from. It's resting on our pipe shelves right now until I buy some twine to hang it in the bedroom.

It's not perfect, but I did my best.