Saturday July 6, 2013
Jacob worked a 72 hour shift (way TOO long!) so the boys and I went to M&P's for the weekend. My mom and I did some serious crafts for my house. We completed two wall hangings and I am so proud of both of them and love how they turned out! Here is the first one:
Jacob had made this sign for me a while back and it has just been hanging in our laundry room blank and desperately needing some love and attention. He made it out of fence pickets. I really had a hard time committing to what I wanted the sign to say. Since it was hanging in our laundry room, I thought about doing "loads of fun" or something along those lines. But after visiting this beyond adorable vintage boutique in Montgomery, I knew instantly I wanted to re-create a sign I saw there that simply stated "You are my happy!" I thought it was precious and really sweet. I love how it turned out!!! So here is the skinny on how we did this sign: we first painted the sign and I used a mixture of a few things. I spray painted it ivory, which I didn't love how the spray paint looked. So my mom went over it with the cream color that we used on the next project. I love how you can still see the original color of the pickets coming through! Next I picked out the font and the size of the lettering, which really took a long time. Then I printed it all out, cut out each letter, taped the letters to the sign and then traced each letter. Next up, we hand painted each letter. I originally thought I wanted the letters to be a dark brown but after doing the "Y" in brown, I quickly changed my mind and went with black.
I really love how this sign turned out and it looks awesome hanging on my wall!!! Simple and sweet!
Next up......I wanted to do my best at recreating this Pottery Barn Kids sibling sign (the brothers one of course!).
Man!!! This turned out to be a time consuming project but I am beyond excited about how it turned out. It all started with a pallet that we had in our back yard. Jacob took it to work one day and took all the boards apart however he was not able to build the sign for me. So my dad got to be handy man for the day!! Dad took four of the boards and created this blank canvas for me.....love my little G jumping in on the picture!
First thing we did was paint the entire board the color I wanted the letters to be. We bought the paint at Lowe's - both colors are Valspar and the best thing was that the sample size was $2.98 and I had more than enough paint for this project using the sample sizes.
Next, my mom printed off all the words for the sign. This took a while because she had to mess around with the sizing of the font and trying to get it to fit perfectly on the sign.
We then ran contact paper through the printer, cut out each letter by hand and then peeled and placed each letter on the sign. This step in the process took FOREVER. I know we did this the old school way - using a cricket or silhouette or any other craft machine would significantly cut back on the time spent but we didn't have access to anything that fancy!! Also, the ink did not do so well on the contact paper so we had ink all over our hands and it was quite a mess. Live and learn!!
This was the paint I used for the top color - I think it was called Bluer Than Blue and I love it!!! Again, $2.98!!! Hello!!
So, next we painted the entire sign blue. One thing I should have done before painting the blue was to paint over the letters with the base color to try to seal the letters to prevent the blue from bleeding.
Once the blue dried, we peeled off the letters and you can see that the blue bleed quite a bit. Again, live and learn! Seal letters before doing the top coat. We had to touch up every.single.letter! Talk about time consuming. Ugh!!!
See the difference? In the picture below, my mom had touched up BRO.THER beautifully. Again, lesson learned!
However, after all the touch ups were done, we had ourselves one awesome sign!!!! Whew. Long process but it didn't have to be. We were beginners and we now know what to do differently.
The best part was that I spent very little on this sign:
*pallet - free
*paint - about $6.00
*contact paper - $2.00
*small paint brushes for all the touch ups - $4.00
Total - $12.00 compared to paying $60.00 at PBK ANDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD it was made with lots and lots of love (and sweat and tears!)!!!
So ready for more projects!!
