Recently we told you about how the Library of Congress scanned 12,000 of Alexander Hamilton’s papers for you to read firsthand. I decided to use them for my Ham-fan daughter by turning Alexander Hamilton’s signature into a shirt.
I used the closing from this letter he wrote when he was 12 and still living in St. Croix. It seems he had more time to make a neater signature back then, as things just get messier as the years go on!
If you’d like to use a different part of the papers, all it takes is a little quality time with your favorite graphics program (I used GIMP). It helps to increase the contrast and decrease the number of colors in the image until you have something pretty clean to work with. I chose not to make it too clean, though, so it still had that 1700s-hand-written look about it.
I then loaded it into Silhouette Studio (the software for my Silhouette Cameo cutting machine) and let it do all the work!
If you have a Silhouette Cameo as well, feel free to skip the graphics work and use my file to create your own Hamilton-signed goodies. Enjoy!
What a great exploitation of the Library of Congress resource for your crafty needs! Thanks for sharing!