Easy Wooden Sign

Hi Friends!

I have been wanting to make a wooden sign for the longest time now and last weekend I finally decided to give it a shot!

Here is the sign I made for my parents. I felt like they needed one ;) and it turned out pretty great! I think the size is perfect! I will most definitely be making more of these. It was a little intimidating at first but I figured nothing in life is easy right?

So Josh and I headed to Home Depot and gathered our supplies: 

• One 1x4 @ 10 ft long ( we asked the nice people in the lumber department to cut 3 pieces at 40 inches)
• sharpie paint pen in white
• 4 metal tie plates (we used 4 of those but next time I think I would just rather attach 1x2's to the back)
• screws
• wood stain of choice (I used Minwax Dark Walnut, LOVE it)

Now I did not take pictures and I do apologize so I am going to do my best to describe each step..

Once we got home, we sanded the areas where they were cut. 

Then, I laid out the pieces I wanted on the front, faced down. 

From there, Josh attached the metal tie plates to hold the wood together. (But like I said, next time I am just going to use two 1x2's that are a tad smaller than my sign to hold the wood pieces together.)

Stained and waited for it to dry.

For the wording, I knew I wanted my parents last name and the year they got married. And, I needed to make a print out that was big enough to cover the wooden sign. So I got on PowerPoint. 

I have PowerPoint 2010, if you click on the 'Design' tab, there should be an option for 'Page Set up'. I typed in my height and width of the sign.

From there, I made the letters fit to my dimensions.

I then saved it as a PDF, selected to print and clicked the 'poster' setting and checked the box with 'cut marks'

I had a total of 12 pages for this poster when I went to print.

So after all that shenanigans, I taped the poster pieces together and laid it on top of my board to trace. You can use the chalk method, where you cover the entire back of the poster with chalk and then trace it over the wood, but I wasn't feeling it. I just laid the poster on my sign and traced the letters with a pen. Make sure you trace hard enough to make the indention on the wood!!

Once that was done, I grabbed my sharpie paint pen and painted my markings!

I am pretty impressed with how it turned out! I am thinking next time I will just free hand the letters. I better start working on my penmanship ;)

If you have any questions about the steps, go ahead and comment below and I will do my best to help you out!

Until next time!

xo,