French Vintage Friday – Vintage Wooden Sign

It’s here again.

Can you feel it?

I can.

Fall.

It’s truly one of my most favorite seasons and I’d love it even more if winter wasn’t just around the corner every time fall gets it’s most beautiful. Of course I adore all things Christmas but to be honest with you, I could do without the weather we get where I live. I struggle with months of gray and gloom.

But let’s not talk about gray and gloom when we can talk about vibrant color and crisp autumn breezes and crunchy apples and pumpkins as far as the eye can see and pumpkin spice everything and cozy sweaters with leggings and boots and evening bonfires and baking and……

But I haven’t been doing all those things yet because it’s barely able to be considered fall and in fact I’m pretty much stretching it as it is…..and because I’ve had some sick kiddos for the past 4 days or so. Life for me has been cozied up with my babies, fetching yummy food and drinks for them and watching movies. My house is a mess, my dishes are piled high in the sink and the floors have an alarming number of dust bunnies scuttling across them. When it got to the point where I couldn’t take the boredom for a moment longer I decided to work on a little project that I could do while sitting and cuddling my babies.

Wanna see?

I thought so.

I chose an old scrap of wood I had in my garage that was left over from a recent project. It doesn’t look like much at the moment but just wait!

I don’t know exactly how old this piece of wood is but based on some of the details of how the furniture was made that it came from, it could even be antique. Vintage to be sure….

Isn’t it pretty after a good sanding?

I also ran it through my table saw to cut it into a rectangle instead of the curved bit that was on the one side of it before. Initially I thought I’d leave the curved bit because it shows some of it’s past and what it used to be however that made it too tall to fit in most of the places I knew I’d want to display it so….

Now this isn’t going to be rocket science and it probably isn’t even something you haven’t already seen but I’m going to use printed words to make an outline for the lettering on a sign.

I just printed the quote I wanted to use on plain printer paper in a size and font I liked….

Then turn it over and color the back with a pencil just where the lettering is.

Once you flip it back over to the right side and place it where you want it on the wood, you trace the letters fairly hard with a pencil and when you remove the paper you can see the lettering.

At that point it’s just a matter of painting the lettering or going over them with a permanent marker but I usually use a permanent marker.

Once you have the outline traced you can color it in.

This was the perfect thing for while I was watching those movies with my babies.

Once it was all colored in I took some fine sandpaper and lightly sanded the surface just to make the lettering look a bit older and like it had aged like the wood. This is completely optional but it goes better with all my vintage treasures I have all over my home.