vernacular

I’m officially starting work on a very big project. It’s kind of daunting and all encompassing, I’m not always sure where to start.
I was playing around with the concept of coming up with my own typefaces for though, and drew up this:

It’s sort of a roughly inspired by the work of Hoefler and Frere-Jones (who most Mac users will be familiar with from their beautiful Hoefler typeface). It’s an attempt at a retro, vernacular, titling, sans-serif. I’ve thrown it in some graphic mockups for the project, and I think it looks pretty hot. I just need to figure out how the heck to turn it into a real-live, honest to goodness font. There are very few font editors out there, and all of them cost money. I would love to ownFontlab, as it seems to be the best program out there, and it would work on my Mac - but I think I’m gonna have to settle for Font Creator which does not work on Macs but costs 400 dollars less as it has a free 30 day trial.
I know I’m no Jonathan Hoefler, but I just want the text in my art to be as personal as the art itself, but be a little cleaner and more consistent than my normal scrawl.
Is that really too much to ask? It seems for less than 500 dollars it might be.
Also, I’ve got the cat addicted to smoked turkey. Is that weird? She won’t touch canned salmon, or cheese, or cat snax, or wet cat food… but she tries to eat our sandwiches when they have smoked turkey in them. She’ll occasionally eat ground beef and fresh salmon, but she freaks out for smoked turkey. She’s not your average picky eater, she’s practically human in her choices. I’m gonna use it against her though, and train her to actually come when I call her with little meaty bribes.