Everyone’s favorite season is fall. Not mine! Yes, it is pretty but for me it means the cold winter is just around the corner. Football has the same meaning…winter! I will complain about the winter but in all likelihood will remain here until it’s time for my dear hubby to retire. He says we’ll go somewhere warm then. We shall see, I think it all depends on where JP is in life/school too 😉
I’m also mot much of a Halloween fan because so many decorations are spiders and that’s my phobia. I get the chills driving past houses in the neighborhood that have the big outdoor spider decorations. I also just got the chills typing that! Now that JP is getting older I want to be festive for him. When I started seeing all of the cute yard signs popping up on Pinterest I remembered all of the scrap wood we had on the side of our house in the wood pile from when we finished the basement as well as some the neighbor’s contractor gave us when they finished their basement too. One day when JP was taking his nap I went and gathered the ones I was going to use and came up with my plan.
The first is with a leftover piece of plywood from when we built my scrapbook table. It was perfect for a sign to have on the front porch.
I didn’t take a before picture but I painted it white and due to the natural roughness in the wood it was easy to give it the distressed look without having to actually distress it. I just didn’t get a ton of paint on the brush and it left areas unpainted.
This is a during photo. I cut out the bats and cat with my Eclips and traced them onto the sign. I found a font that I liked but needed it too big to cut out with the Eclips so I had to free hand the stencil to use.
It was a windy day so the black stake is just holding down my templates so I could lay it out and trace it. After it was traced I painted. This is the finished product.
The same afternoon I painted all of the other pieces of wood for the street style sign. I gave JP a small scrap piece of wood and the lid of one of the cans of paint to keep him occupied while I did a lot of this. Shortly after we started some of the neighborhood kids came outside too so he ran around with them.
For this I had 4 pieces of wood and painted 4 different colors. I forgot about cutting them to look like arrows until after I was done painting and this was supposed to be a quick project so I had to think about what to do there.
This is what I came up with, hombre arrows painted on the end. I semi free-handed the letters. I found a couple of fonts but they were too detailed to actually cut out and trace so I just did a rough outline by tracing hard so the pressure went through the paper onto the wood so I’d have an idea about size and spacing then free-hand painted the letters from there.
I screwed it all together from the back and ta-da, we now have another DIY decoration. I didn’t really distress this too much because I figured being outside and stored away every year that it wouldn’t take long to distress on it’s own.
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