Do It Yourself

You’ll be hard pushed to find a wedding on Pinterest that doesn’t feature some sort of wooden signage these days. Whether it’s to display a hashtag, a menu for the bar or signs to direct guests around your venue, they are extremely practical as well as pretty.

Unfortunately, getting these things custom made (which is likely unless you want generic phrases) is costly, and I wasn’t going to shell out when I knew I would be able to create something similar myself. I ended up making around 10 different wooden signs of varying size and purpose for our wedding, so thought I’d put together a little guide on how I did it so you can too!

You’ll Need…

• A Pencil
• Paintbrushes (small enough for fine lines as well as a heavier-duty brush for staining your wood)
• White paint
• White Tracedown paper
• Masking tape
• Wooden panels cut to size
• Wood stain (Apple cider vinegar, tea and steel wool or a regular wood stain)

Wood

For the wood I went to Homebase and picked out a couple of huge sheets of Birch Plywood. It’s cheap, as well as being light and thin, which means you can transport it easily. Whilst at Homebase I had them slice it up for me in the various dimensions that I required – do your maths before you go!

Other wood can be used, but make sure it’s got a grain, and that the surface is smooth enough to paint details on.

For this tutorial, I was given a free piece of scrap plywood that was floating around in a DIY store – so it’s always worth asking to see if they have any off-cuts!

Step 1: Stain

If you’ve bought birch plywood, the chances are it’s not going to be a very nice colour. For the signs at our wedding, I purchased an outdoor wood stain in a colour I thought would work best – it was slightly warmer than I wanted it to be, but it did the job. I couldn’t seem to find any stains that would give me the cool, aged look I wanted.

Since then, I’ve read up about another amazing way to age wood that gives you a wonderfully genuine look, and it’s using bits that you might already have around the house. Using apple cider vinegar, steel wool and a good ol’ cup of black tea, you can create a stain that looks super natural. Click through here to find out how it’s done.

Step 2: Design

Create the design for your sign in Photoshop, or your chosen program. Of course, if you’re a skilled calligrapher, feel free to go ahead and freehand it, but to ensure everything was uniform and so I didn’t run the risk of ruining any of my panels, I used a font.

I measured each of my panels and then created a document of the same size in Photoshop, allowing me to mock-up exactly what it would look like. For our signs, I used the font Adelicia Script, but Bombshell Pro is also popular for this kind of project. There are plenty of other script fonts available on Creative Market for you to scroll through if you fancy something different. For free options, check out dafont.com.

I then printed out the designs (ensuring there was no resizing in the print options), sometimes split across several pieces of A4 paper for larger signs.

Step 3: Trace

Get yourself a sheet of your white Tracedown paper and place it the correct way down on your wooden panel. Place your printouts on top (taped together like mine if you needed to use multiple pieces of paper!) and then use masking tape to ensure it’s all stuck down to the board and won’t shift when you are tracing over the letters.

Take a pencil (or pen) and trace as neatly as you can over the outside edges of your font. When you’re done, remove both the design and the Tracedown.

Step 4: Paint

Now it’s time to paint! Get your small brushes and white paint and colour in all of the lines, also going over the ones you created with the Tracedown. I used a white furniture paint, which turned out to be slightly too thick to create thin, neat lines, but it did the job. I suggest practising thin lines with your paintbrush and paint on your tester piece of wood to see how they come out – the right brush and paint combo will make all the difference!

Leave it to dry, and you’re good to go!

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