Making your own magnetic poetry.

To buy magnetic poetry – no matter how fascinating and wonderful the stuff is - does end up pretty expensive. As Iseult mentioned above – making it is far, far cheaper. However, I use a different method, which I feel gives a result closer to the stuff you buy in the shops. I love Iseult’s method – and use that, but only with the off-cuts.

Equipment:

Method:

In a word processing program such as Microsoft word, type in all the words you could possibly imagine yourself requiring in order to create magnetic poetry masterpieces. I use Times New Roman (boring little me….) in size 18 font. Extend the margins out so you use as much of the page as you possibly can. Set the line spacing to 1.5.

You must remember to put two spaces between each word – not just one. Otherwise, your words will look cramped when you cut them out. Or of course, type it out with one space, and then do a replace-all (thankyou BlakJak).

Ensure you get all the most frequently used words in the language – I generally do at least three lots of the one hundred most used English words. There is a very long list (about 1000) here. Then – add all the words you want. Add your name, your SO’s name, your pets’ names. All the words that they never put in the magnetic poetry sets – you know….Lesbians! Monkeys! Soy! Ass-fuckingly! And so on.

Add symbols, numerals, spare letters, and lots of “ing” and “es” and “ed” and other useful suffixes and prefixes. Exclamation marks and question marks come in very handy. Also fun can be picking the good symbols out of something like the wingdings font. I go for themes – listing every animal I can think of, every gem, every type of fabric….All these words that just brim over with potential.

Then – when you’ve put in all the words and characters that you want – look at your pages on the screen. Over to the right hand side are all these gaps. Go down the screen and add small useful words in these gaps – I, we, you, sex, etc. Make sure you utilize every centimetre of space. Then – remember to spell check. Can’t have badly spelled magnetic poetry, now can we?

If you want – consider a test print run on a piece of paper. Then – the exciting bit. Print off your magpo onto the magnet backed paper. It often requires 24 hours to dry – leave it somewhere where not too much dust will settle on it, where the cat won’t tread on it, etc.

When it’s dry, cut out the words. I use the ruler and razor to separate every line of typing, then use the scissors to cut apart all the words. There will be little bits of magnet paper left over – keep them. With these left over bits – consider making ransom letter poetry – various different newspaper and magazine letters stuck onto them. Or tiny pictures that you draw yourself, or calligraphy letters, or anything else that comes to mind. A few blank bits of magpo are handy if you want to hide part of a word when composing your bullshit masterpiece.


And now, the good bit! One pack of the type of magnetic backed paper that I buy costs around US$7. That’s five pages, which gives enough to cover at least one fridge with words, almost two if you only cover the front. I recently made two packs worth of words, and have enough magnetic poetry to cover three fridges: mine, Nemosyn and BlakJak’s, and Huntsmaniac’s. We’ll have a big magnetic poetry distributing party on the weekend.

The magnetic poetry isn’t quite as user friendly as the real thing – it’s thinner, occasionally hops off the fridge when you don’t want it to, and can be a bugger to get off the fridge when (eg) you’re drunk and trying to play with it. But for $15 and a little time to cover three fridges with personalized magnetic poetry with crunchy good words on it – I say it’s worth it.