Let's Make a Fun Text Decal in Inkscape and Gimp

Fire up Inkscape.

Select the Text tool and pick out a font that is thick. I chose Once in a while, size 144.
Write the words you want for your message. I wrote Loving It. But write the words one letter at a time, clicking on the canvas to
deselect each letter, so that the word will not be all together, that way we will be able to work with it.

Now rotate the letters to your likeing. To rotate in one direction, slect the letter you want to rotate, then, press the Alt key plus the opening bracket [, to rotate in the opposite
direction, select the letter you want to rotate and then press the Alt key and the closing bracket ]. Once you have the letters in the direction you want, click on the select tool (arrow) and
draw a selection around the word or words you have writing, now click on Ctrl + G to group the selected letters.

Click on the canvas to deselect the grouping, and click on the letters again, then go to Edit, Duplicate, then Paste. Move the duplicated text below the original text and keep it selected.

Now, click on Ctrl + Shift + F, so that the Fill and Stroke menu will appear. Chose stroke paint.
Choose a medium gray, then go to stroke style, and choose a width of 18.00 and a miter limit of 18.00 and choose for Join choose the first box. Now drag your selection and place it on top of the previous text.
Then, to to the top of the page and select Lower Selection One Step, the 9th button up there from the left.
Now Click on the select arrow and draw a selection over the whole text and go to Path, Union, to join it all together. Export as a PNG, to to File Export Bitmap.

Now, go to Gimp. Open your ext decal there. Now select the bucket tool. Choose a pattern that you like (there are many free patterns online for Gimp that you can download) and click on Pattern Fill.
Apply to the inside of your text. Now select FG color Fill and change the Foreground color to White. Apply White to the gray all around the outside of your text.

Finally, go to Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur, apply a 5.0 blur. Now go to Script-Fu and choose Drop Shadow. Now go to Filters, Blur. Save as a PNG as follows, go to Save As, then click on Select File Type (By Extension and pick PNG).

Click to merge the layers and then to save it. (Do this even if you see the png on your file name, because otherwise, what I have found is that Gimp tends to save files as its proprietorial file format and then you cannot open them in other scrapbooking software.)

Done!

Bible Universe