Personalizing a desk top

I am on a guest room roll lately.  

Here's the situation.  

I was scrolling through the Graphics Fairy again, looking for some clip art of a frame with lots of curly-ness and frou-frou.  I am in the process of dressing up a desk in a guest room.  I wanted something with a French phrase in it that would look pretty and also say something warm and inviting.  I found just the right "frame" and decided to put my own phrase inside of it.  I used the frame graphic found here.  So pretty and exactly what I was looking for!

 Now, I needed to transfer that design to the desk top.  I didn't want to use carbon paper for two reasons.  

1.  I didn't want ink on the desk top that 

could interfere with the paint I'll put on later.

2.  I wanted to be able to erase any mistakes

I might make in the transfer process.

So, I turned the piece over and covered the back of the clip art area with graphite from the pencil.

No need to be careful - you want to get plenty of graphite on the paper so it transfers well.  Then you flip it over with the graphite side down and start tracing.  This doesn't take long at all.  It doesn't have to be perfect.

 

After that, I centered the French phrase I had decided on and traced that, again, graphite side down.

You can translate any combination of words using Google Translate.  I have it on my homepage - it's a gadget that you can download for no cost.   I put in the sentence, "Welcome to our lovely guest."  You can choose from Albanian to Ukrainian!   It's an easy way to find out what all those french phrases say on that great Graphics Fairy clip art, if you don't speak French!  The gadget looks like this:

Google Translate

After I traced my design, I pulled away the paper and this is the design I'll be painting. 

 This is the end of the road for tonight.  When you spend your days with a roomful of 6th graders, you fade quickly in the evening.  Tomorrow is another day . . . and I'll be painting!

UPDATE:  I've posted the finished desk here.

This post is on Brag Monday at the Graphics Fairy.