No Soliciting

I have not written a post in a long time! Even though I am constantly making signs, I was working on my last capstone class to get a bachelors degree, which took most of my time. With that being said, I have a sign that many people have told me that they absolutely love it and are willing to pay me to make them one. I do not sell the things I make because I only make them for personal use and I enjoy writing about the process I went through to get them done.

So this sign is a "No Soliciting" sign. I have made several signs and with this one I took the longest I've ever taken on any sign. First of all, I do not have a program that allows me to make large wording signs and print as one whole sign. I am constantly reading Pinterest post and getting ideas on how to do large signs. One blogger mentioned making a Power Point and adjust the size to my desired size and saving it as a pdf would do the trick. well I guess I was not very good at following her instructions but I was not able to make it. On a second occasion I read about Adobe Illustrator and I signed up for a free trial. It worked wonders. I was able to create my desired size wording and when it was time to prin, it printed on several pages as one big sign. I loved it! However, the trial was over, and it was too pricey for me to order the program. So I was back to square one. On another occasion I read about making my own stencil. That idea sounded great until I decided to do it and it was not as easy as I thought it would be.

This sign was made using the stencil I made. Here is my long process:

1. I began by making the wording on Microsoft word.

2. I printed it and cut every line of the wording.

3. I taped it onto a large cardboard.

4. using an exacto knife I cut around every single letter.

There! this sound simple but cutting around the letters was not easy. Especially because I used different types of fonts. Anyway, right after I started cutting I quickly realized that I was in for a long process. It took me several hours because I have two kids and I can only work on my projects at night. Once I was done cutting the stencil, I immediately started on the painting part. As usual I took someone's trick and used a makeup sponge to tap the paint onto the board instead of using a paint sponge or a brush. It was not what I was expecting so my paint bled through. "Nooooo" was my firth thought. My husband however gave me the idea to use the wood burning tool to burn all around the letters and make it look better. I burnt on every single letter and that took another 4 or 5 hours of work.

After I finish burning around the letters I sanded it all over it again (I sanded extra around the letters that bled more). Once I was done sanding, I restained the board, I painted each letter with a small brush and burnt around the letters that need it a touch up.

once I was happy with the look I used Mod Podge to finish it and voila! It was finally done!