Thumbprint Writing

Hi. My name is Jamie, and I’m addicted to Pinterest.

Ok, so I’m not really addicted — but I do adore all the fantastic ideas I’ve gleaned from Pinterest: crafty things, decorating ideas, recipes, delightful organization ideas, and more! The first few times I visited the site, I’d heard good things but didn’t really “get” it. Once it clicked, though, I started pinning like a mad woman!

One of the fun things I found there was a big fingerprint with writing on the lines of the fingerprint. I immediately decided this was something I wanted to do with Kathryn! We’d recently had an interesting discussion about fingerprints, and although she’s a great writer, she’s also quite a reluctant writer sometimes.

So…

First, we used an ink pad and stamped our thumbprints onto a piece of white paper. I don’t have a copier that enlarges things (not properly, anyway), but that would probably be the easiest way to do it. In our case, I took a photo of the fingerprints, imported the photo to my computer, enlarged it, and then printed it. I also made it lighter so it printed in a way that we could actually write directly on top of the lines. However, you could also use tracing paper to write. This was so fun that I did it myself, rather than just requiring Kathryn to do it!

My fingers are long and skinny, so my thumbprint (at right) is ridiculously long in comparison to Kathryn’s!
Fingerprint Writing

Kathryn’s thumbprint writing in process:
fingerprint writing

What was so fun for me — and less writing-intimidating to Kathryn, I think — is that we wrote in a free-flowing, as-the-thoughts-come sort of way. Random. We wrote about pets, our favorite season of the year, what we like to do, things that happened the year we were born, and so on. The only requirement was that we wrote about ourselves.

After all, each fingerprint is entirely unique, and so are we.