Personalised plaque / sign new baby

Thought I would share a commissioned personalised door sign and plaque that I made. This was for a friend to send to America for her brother who just had a little baby girl.

I used one of my bulk-bought plaques from ebay without holes drilled. Since I bought my dremel 3000 I wont buy them with the holes pre-drilled as sometimes I make something and decide that I prefer it not to have twine poking through at the front. With baby gifts, for example, I find that it a more eloquent finish can be achieved by attaching ribbon to the back of the sign using double sided tape.

I wanted to create a border on this sign as I wanted it to be quite plain, but eye catching nonetheless. I spray painted the entire plaque in white and left it dry. I then used making tape to section off the border. I was worried that the masking tape would pull up the paint when I took it off so I only placed the masking tape down loosely. When I pulled it up I realised the paint had seeped under the masking tape. Initially I was mortified but after leaving it to dry and them going back to it I decided I actually really liked it. It kind of gave it a a torn paper feel. Anyway, I spray painted my letters and hearts, measured out where I wanted them placed and then glued them down with super glue. To attach the ribbon to hang the sign I placed some double sided tape at either end of the plaque vertically (from top to bottom) and stuck the ribbon in place.

For the details plaque I used my Kobra spray paints again, and wooden bear shape bought off ebay and a heart embellishment bought from Debs cards & crafts (unfortunately now closed down).

How to decorate a wooden wine box using the tracing technique

Remember that wine box I bought from the car boot sale a couple of weeks ago? Well, I found some time to decorate it. I decided to try decorating by hand using the retro-school tracing technique. I'll show you how....

I started by painting the box using a sample pot of coloured emulsion paint from B&Q (£1.10 a tub) in olive green. I gave it two thin coats, but I think one would have been fine. I decided not to paint the I side of the box as I will fill it with straw to present the wine so it wouldn't be seen anyway. Actually, the truth is I was too keen to crack on with it. If I were to sell this I think i'd paint the inside too. 

Using Microsoft publisher I created a rectangle shape the same size as the lid on the box. This meant I could position the text and resize the font so that it was central and looked good. I messed around with the font until I found one I was happy with and then printed it off and cut it out. I deliberately choose a skinny font. I wanted it to look like handwriting, but neat.

I then coloured over the back of the writing with a pencil. This gave me flashbacks to rainy schools spent tracing ridiculously detailed images from textbooks and transferring them into exercise books.

Once coloured I turned it back around and stuck it in place on the lid using a piece of masking tape.  This ensured the paper stayed in place as I tried to trace it into my box. I then drew around each of the letters using a biro which transferred the pencil markings underneath to the wood.

I  peeled away the paper to reveal the writing in light pencil.

I carefully coloured in the writing with a super fine paintbrush. This was my main mistake. I really do not have a stead enough hand for a paintbrush. Really I should have used my uni posca paint pens, but they don't offer the variety of colours I want to work with. So, I either need to learn to steady my hand, find an super-duper-fine paint brush, or fork out for a bucket load of paint pens from somewhere. Practise makes perfect as they say....

It didn't look great. It looked unfinished. I umm'ed and arr'ed for ages about whether to go Around the letters with a black marker or not. Eventually I decided that since I didn't like it as it was, I couldn't make it worse. So I went ahead. Still, it looked "dodgy" to say the least. I persevered with it as i thought whilst it looked a bit odd, once finished it may add character. I'm glad I did because I actually really like the finished item.

The next decision was the embellishments. It definitely needed something but I couldn't decide what looked best:

Finally I bit the bullet and went for the stars. I painted them in the same colour I'd used for the letters, outlined them using my fine liner too, and then stuck them on using superglue. Voila! 

Disney Countdown Sign

We are going to Disney World Florida in October as a celebratory treat to mark the end of a year of operations for Joseph. We booked it shortly after we found out that our baby would have a cleft lip and palate while I was pregnant. The most difficult thing to come to terms with was the fact that my poor little baby would have to go through the pain of the operations. We knew feeding was going to be more difficult than it would be with a non-cleft baby and we just felt that we could do with something to look forward to after dealing with all the difficulties we would face.

I was lucky enough to visit twice as a child but my partner Simon has only ever been to EuroDisney. He is Disney crazy and always buying the boys DVDs and popping into the Disney store to buy them little treats. Needless to say he is VERY excited about the holiday. As I've said before he regularly rolls his eyes when I try to talk to him about my ideas or makes so I thought I would test him..... and I made him this countdown plaque:

I actually made two and gave him the choice of which to use. He said he wanted both! :o) so the small one has been made into a magnet and put on the fridge and the larger one is on the kids bedroom door. You can't see it in the picture but there us a stick of chalk attached to the string that holds the sign up.

The plaques were bought from the same seller on ebay - I negotiated the price for buying them in bulk and with the holes pre-drilled. They were painted using my Kobra spray paint. The Mickey Mouse head shape was bought from my trusty LaserSmith and painted with chalk paint bought from hobbycraft. They were glued on using Gorilla superglue and the writing and decorating was completed using my uni posca paint pens.

It took about 30 minutes to make both of them and that included paint drying time. Simples!!

Decorating wooden plaques using Decal Paper

So, I've said in a previous blog that my writing on wooden plaques isn't brilliant and that I would be trying different methods to be able to offer a more professional finish.

Cue the decal paper method...

I love my quotes, but I want to be able to present them in an eye catching style. Decal paper is bascially an image transfer paper. It works a little bit like those tattoos you used as a kid. It is perfect for decorating wooden plaques, especially as I would be able to include a picture.... I just needed to master its use...........!

I searched my quotes board on Pinterest and decided to use a quote by Marilyn Monroe. I then search for a black and white image of her on google images. I decided to use my 100mm x 100mm square plaque so using Microsoft publisher I drew a box 100mm x100mm (this was simply to use as a guide for positioning my image and text - I deleted it before printing as I didn't want it to appear on my printed image). I positioned my image, wrote my text, altered the font and size and faffed and fiddled with the layout. When I was happy with how it looked I copied the entire image and pasted it into Paint where I flipped the image so It was back to front (otherwise when the image was transferred the writing would be the wrong way round). Then I printed it according the instructions that came with the decal paper (different brands of decal paper work differently so I won't attempt to give instructions on this). I am reliably informed that I could have just changed my printer settings to print  "mirrored", but my IT skills are a little basic and this was the easiest way for me to do it.

I painted my plaque with my Kobra spray paint in a very pale pink and set about transferring the image. Really I should have photographed the process to explain exactly how the decal transfer worked, but a) I didn't know I'd get it to work, and b) I would rather say I use "x" brand of decal paper and this is how it works.

Incidententally I used dry rub decal paper here. There is also waterslife decal paper which involves wetting the transfer image. I tried the water slide decal paper first (as its cheaper) and failed miserably. It seems like the easier option as you simply print, spray with an acrylic varnish a couple of times, wet, then apply the image. However, when I tried I mustn't have sprayed the image with enough varnish as the ink ran when I placed it in water and it was unusable. It might be worth trying laserjet printed images rather than inkjet-something else to try!

Dry rub decal paper involved a series and sticking and peeling films and rubbing out air bubbles. I found a few bubbles in the final product-but I'm sure ill get better at it and figure out how to avoid the bubbles. I was disappointed in this method as I'd hoped for a flawless transfer, whereby it looked like the image/text had been painted directly on to the wooden plaque, but when you look closely it looks a giant sticker. The other image I have ready to try doesn't go right the edge so it may be that I just need to be more clever about the design.

Anyway, here is the final product. I plan to put my dremel to good use and drill holes to make this a hanging plaque...