Vintage Name Board

So I've been seeing these awesome vintage looking signs all over Blogland. So of course, I had to jump on the bandwagon and try it myself.

I had some old barnwood that's been chillin' in my garage for a while. This stuff is HARD to find. You'd swear it was made of gold. Geez! I mean, I live in the... I guess it'd be the suburbs? We're ten minutes from a big city but we have a lot of farms around us. There is an alpaca farm up the road, a longhorn up another road, cows everywhere, it's pretty cool, I love where we live. But being that there are so many farms and such around us, I thought that old wood would be easy to find. Like, laying on the side of the road, begging for me to pick it up, easy to find. But nope. No luck on Craigslist, driving around, nada. But luckily, there is a little thing called Facebook. I put up a status that I was looking for old wood, and a friend came to my rescue. She had some that she was no longer going to be using (she's a baby photographer with a ton of props) and offered it to me. Gotta love the generosity of people!

I found a tutorial on Funky Junk Interiors that I used. Seriously, SO easy! And if you mess up? Well, that's part of the charm, right? And we'll just say we planned it.

So the first thing I did was decide what colors I wanted to use. She suggests that a bright color as the base coat, followed by a darker, less scary color on top is the way to go.

I picked up these stencils at Hobby Lobby. They were originally $5.99, but use those 40% off coupons, people! It came as three large sheets, but I cut out each letter individually. I'm crazy like that.

I didn't want to paint more of the board than I needed to (so I could use it for another future project), so I figured out my placement, put a mark on the board so I knew how far to paint, and then started painting. For my first coat, I picked a pretty blueish teal color. Which I love and would totally would have rocked it as the top coat, but hubby would have looked at me like I was insane. So my gorgeous color is on the bottom.

I made sure to get the blue in all the cracks and crevices. Then I did my red color on the top. I didn't put it on too thick, just a bunch of light coats left to right. I didn't want to completely cover up the blue color.

Now, I could have done the red color and then hit it up with some sandpaper, but I'm all about saving time. So the light coats mimicked the sandpaper. I think. At this point, my 7 year old came into the room, and after seeing it, she said "Wow, Mom! You made it look like it's really, really old! Like, twenty years old!" So if 20 is old, Mommy must be ancient. Yikes.

So my next step is putting on the letters. Pretty simple stuff. Lay down a stencil, fill it in lightly with some yellow paint. Put down the next letter, rise and repeat, etc etc.

So, at this point, it's looking pretty good, right? This is where I got out my sandpaper, and lightly hit up the letters to where the red is starting to show. And it's looking all awesome and old. Like, twenty years old.

After that, I sawed off the end, and hit it up with some matte clear sealer, and voila! C'est fini.

Easy peasy, japanesy.

If I did a giveaway of one of these, with your last name or something under 8ish letters, would you be interested?





Let's party, what what!