You could say I have an obsession. Ever since I moved into my own place I have been obsessed with Pinterest and the art of "doing it yourself". However, unfortunately I didn't have all the tools I needed for what all my mind could imagine. I did what I could then, but now having a boyfriend (Kyle) who has grown up around construction and that lives on a farm definitely has its advantages. Back in December was the first time I got the chance to work with wood, that is when I made the coffee table and side tables. I'll admit it is difficult when you do not have a lot of the required tools needed for all the projects you see on Pinterest and Youtube. So for my first wood project, Kyle had to borrow a lot of the needed tools from his father. But here recently, we purchased a jigsaw!! I'm so very excited and my brain has just been constantly going with all the projects I actually can do now.
So what to do now with the new jigsaw? Well, Kyle's house has been in desperate need of some decorations. So of course I thought, why not add some wall decor? With some of the wood pallets we had around on the farm, I knew the wood pallet signs would be perfect. So using the jigsaw and a little sweat, we took apart the wood pallets and used the boards to make this sign.
I put all the boards in the order and direction I wanted, my handy man screwed in the supports to the back. Then onto the sander, and after sanding I made sure to wipe it down to get rid of all the dust. I started to stain it. As I stain I like to wipe it down with a paper towel immediately. This allow it to not soak up too much of the stain and it allows it to dry a lot faster. I'm a very impatient person, so this is the main reason I do this. Putting the wood sign together really didn't take as many tools as I originally thought it would.
I then got on my laptop onto the Cricut design space. This is where I uploaded the tree of life image I found online. I put this into the new project. I then cut the image into four pieces so that I could make this image large and still be able to cut it out with my Cricut machine. If you are unfamiliar with the Cricut Machine it can only cut 12 inches wide. I then added a rectangular background that would simulate the wood signs dimensions so that I could determine how big I would want the tree of life and the quote beside it.
Now that I had the image put together for how I imagined it on the wood sign, to the cutting board it goes. I had to individually cut out 5 different pieces for this sign because the image was so massive. Now that the vinyl was cut out I just had to place it onto the wood sign to use as a stencil.
Once I had the tree of life vinyl stencil on the sign, I decided to trace the image and just paint in the image carefully. This took literally forever. I do not recommend doing it this way. I was just too scared that the paint would run under the vinyl (since this was the first time I had used a vinyl stencil on wood.) After the tree was finished I placed the vinyl stencil for the quote to the right of it. This time I decided to just try and use it as it was originally intended and to just paint over it, hoping the paint didn't seep through the edges. While I waited for the words to dry I did a second coat of paint on the tree. Then when the paint had dried I removed the stencil used for the words. The paint did seep through on the edges of this vinyl (Oracal 651). It wasn't that bad though, it's mainly caused by the lack of smoothness of the wood. I have read that putting a coat of modge podge on the stencil will help with sealing the edges of the vinyl so that the paint won't seep through the corners.
This is what the final product looks like, and honestly for this being my very first attempt I cannot be any happier.
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Lots of love,
Kayla