Inspired by a few greeting cards I've seen along the way and the wonderful art of Jenni Horne of Mattie's Social Circle, I painted a Merry Christmas sign.
I'm pretty excited about it. Unlike the color of our house, which does not excite me and I had on the list to change this year. Oh well, there's always 2011...
In fact, it's my most favorite wooden sign I've ever made. Not that I've made a lot of wooden signs.
I started off with a piece of scrap plywood from our garage. The dimensions were not exactly what I wanted so I enlisted the help of the circular saw. I used a t-square to help me draw a nice straight line and then proceeded to cut somewhat nearby said line. Straight lines are not my strong suit.
Next step, priming with black gesso. Jenni shared on her blog this cool technique along with creating your base drawing with chalk (hello, genius!). Jenni used this method with elementary school students, so I figured I could do it too ;-). I first drew my design on the backside of the plywood in pencil. Then I turned it over to the primed side and drew something completely different--that I liked much better.
Over the next, oh, 2 weeks, I painted a bit here and there when I had a few spare minutes. The most time consuming part was filling in with the red paint around the white painted words. The white painted (my handwriting) words took a while too. The rest was pretty straightforward.
Yesterday I decided the sign was done enough and powered up the sander. Naturally I can't find my Mouse sander, so I had to use the larger circular one we have. After wiping off the paint dust, I put a bit of Elmer's glue on each of the white polka dots and sprinkled on irridescent glitter. Finally I coated the whole thing with two coats of matte poly.
This morning I scavenged around the garage and found the last 2 sawtooth hangers we have in inventory. I attached them and (finally) took my baby sign outside to hang.
Ta-da!
All ready to greet everyone that visits us with a timely & festive message--for the next 4 days anyway.
Next year I'm hanging it the day after Thanksgiving ☺.
