Personalized Eye Chart Valentines Wall Art

I love looking at the website RedEnvelope for gift ideas. I never really buy anything from them, as their stuff is too expensive for me, but I just like getting ideas. I happened to spot this personalized eye chart story of us wall art while I was perusing their site for a gift idea.  It is totally cute, but quite pricey at 80 dollars, so I decided to try to make it.  I'm always looking for cheap custom art.  I decided to make the template using Microsoft Word.  It was a little tricky getting the lines justified, but after I got it working it was a breeze (the trick is not to do a carriage return for each line).  I like the RedEnvelope version, but I like mine more because I made it truly personal, by putting in dates and real events.  At the end of this post I have linked the two word documents I used.  You can change up the font colors, sizes, and text (unless your last name happens to be Tang and you met your husband at an internship).  I did go a little crazy and made one for my husband and daughter.  These are so fun and easy to do, you could make one for every member of your family.  I'm still experimenting on DIY ways to transfer the image onto a canvas.  I may just get it printed on a canvas, through those photo canvas websites (that I always see so many Groupons for).

The first version I made didn't have dates on it, but I decided it was cuter with dates.  I made them look like the 20/20 distance numbers on a real eyechart.

This is the image version.  To convert a Microsoft document to an image, I printed the document to a pdf, opened the pdf in photoshop and save as a jpg there.  I think there are free word to image converters out there also.

My other creations for my hubby and daughter.

Here are the word doc templates:
8.5x11
11x17
I uploaded it into google docs, but the formatting does not show up correctly through google docs.  You have to download the file and open it in Microsoft Word.

Update: A reader asked me how to update the border color.  In Microsoft Word 2003, to to Format->Borders and Shading -> Page Border Tab  You can remove the border or update the color or change the border style.  Another option is to copy and paste the text of the document into a new document.

Update2:  If any of your lines is too long, you will have to change the font size down until the lines fit.    You then would have to change all of the subsequent font sizes down to make it look consistent. Remember to use spare bar instead of enter and keep hitting space bar until the next sentence falls onto another line.  You could also expand the margins to make the whole line fit.  Another method in Microsoft Word is to force a justify by hitting shift+crtl+J.


A few things to note if you use these templates.
1. To get the justify correct on each line, do not use "enter"/newline/carriage return, just keep hitting space bar until the line drops down.  
2. The very last line has an "x" in white text.  That is there to get the paragraph justify correctly.  If you change the color of the text and select all, remember to change the x back to white.
3. All the dates on the side have an "x" next to them (again in white text).  This is so I could get the underline to go all the way across.  Again, if you change the text color, be sure to change those x's to white or else you're gonna have dates with x's in them.

Hope you guys have fun with this.  I surely did!