DIY Type

One of my goals for the New Year was to try my hand at some hand lettering.  It is not something I am naturally good at, but I do think it is something that can improve with practice.  So I looked up some websites, and ordered a couple books, and I've been playing with lettering here and there.

One book I was so excited to have the opportunity to review was DIY Type by Dana Tanamachi.  This isn't a traditional book - it consists of a couple chapters and then is filled with stencils for you to use in your own DIY type experiments!  Probably 90% of the book is stencils, including a capital letter alphabet, a small letter alphabet, and some decorative stencils.



Even though there is just one real chapter with instructions, there are definitely a lot of fun ideas packed in that one chapter.  From monogrammed t-shirts to birthday cakes, there are many fun ideas in these pages to get your creativity flowing.  I also really liked how Tanamachi includes some basic ideas for how to embellish your letters to give them that hand-lettered feel, even when using a stencil. I never would have thought of a lot of the embellishments, but they look easy to do.

I decided to test one of the stencils out and make a "G" for Gwen's room - I just doodled a bunch of flowers inside my letter outline.  The only thing I wished I hadn't done was that I bent the paper because I didn't want to take the stencil out of the book yet - and the letter turned out pretty cute, so I wish I had just taken the stencil out!  Maybe I'll just have to make another one.



My plans for the stencils in this book include a birthday banner for Wyatt that I'll be making this weekend…and I might try some of the other ideas in this book, like the personalized notebooks.  I think there are a lot of great gift ideas in here!

If you like the hand-lettered look that is popular now, this book is probably a great place to start!

Note: I received this book for free from Blogging For Books in exchange for this review. This is my honest opinion.