Liz Kennedy Designs: February 2015

Welcome back fellow DIY-ers!!

This is a project that has been in my head for a long time.

When we got a truck load of pallets to make a desk
(that monster post is still in production)
and there were leftovers, I immediately knew I wanted to make a pallet wood sign for the living room. I had seen a yellow/gray sign at a store with plain pressboard and stenciled letters (boring) that was $70 and knew I could do it cheaper!
How does $10 sound? :)

I just love the saying and The Fiance will randomly start singing this song so it was perfect.

Here is how I did it.

I used a sawzall and cut apart the long pallet wood.
Used the chopsaw to cut them all to the desired length.
I had some left-over 1x2s from the desk project and attached all the pallet wood to those to hold them together.
Sand all the pieces down to create a semi-smooth surface to paint
FREE (sorry no pictures of this part, it took both of us to safely do this step)

The next thing I should have done was prime it.

I skipped this since I had paint/primer in one but I ended up using almost the whole sample when I shouldn't have needed to.
But I didn't, so go ahead and do 3 coats of yellow. This is after coat 1.

I do love the color I chose though!

I mocked up the sign in Adobe Illustrator and played with different fonts and placements for weeks until I decided on this one
with a little help from my friends on facebook
I printed it out tiled and taped it together to have a full size version to work with.
The script font is Jenna Sue and the sans serif is Steelfish

I did the next steps in sections.

I "colored" the back of the page with chalk

The using a pencil (or I am using the end of my fine tip paint brush) trace around the letters

You can kind of see here how the chalk transfers to the wood. Its not perfect but when you have the printed version to also work from its pretty good!

And paint! I used just gray $1 acrylic paint I, again, had on hand from another project

I just love being a craft horder! FREE

The downside - each word needed two coats, so it took a little longer but didn't cost me anything - a win in my book. This is after the first coat and starting in on the second coat on the left side of the "g"