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!!

Princess Crown Wooden Sign

A fellow cleft mum has been having a hard time of things lately and her little girl recently went through her palate repair operation. Through all the difficulties she is facing she continues to work for clapa in her fundraising efforts and has applied to become a contact parent for clapa, which means she will act as a point of contact for new/ other cleft parents that may need help with their babies. I thought she could do with a few bits to cheer her up so I made this little Crown Wooden Sign for her daughter.

Both the Crown shape and letters were bought from my favourite craft shape supplier LaserSmith. The heart was bought off ebay as bulk buy of 50, and the small stars were bought as a mixed box of embellishments from hobbycraft.

I started by placing my bits on the plaque to check they fit and see how they looked best. I planned to paint it with my Kobra spray paint in pink.

I always spray both sides of the plaque-even when the back is unlikely to be seen. I think it looks more professional. I ordered some items from some established crafty pages off facebook and was really disappointed when they arrived and were only painted on the embellished side. Especially as it was an item where the back could be seen, I.e. on a freestanding shape! You MUST make sure it is thoroughly dry before attempting to paint the other side though. If you have sprayed a thick coat (as I always end up doing because I'm too inpatient) I recommend waiting a good few hours before turning around to spray the back. However, it is a better recommendation to use the spray paint as instructed on the tin and just do several thin coats as it dries much quicker this way.

I glued the embellishments in place using superglue (I have found this gives a much better finish that a hot glue gun as it doesn't ooze out of the sides and it sticks well without the need to clamp it together for half an hour after gluing - can you tell I am impatient?)And those of you with eagle eyes may have noticed that there have been holes drilled into 2 of the crowns peaks. To do this I used my Dremel 3000 (see, it was an essential buy afterall :o)!)

So that my lovely CLAPA friend knew why the devil she was receiving this gift I also made her a card...

I would like to enter this card into the One Stop Craft Challenge Challenge #238 - Pastel Colours

It was a pig to try to photograph this card. I love the design, but again I am disappointed with the stamped sentiment, which reads 'THINKING OF YOU'..... YOU NEED NEW INK PADS :o)

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...

Decorating wooden plaques

I've been decorating wooden plaques for nearly two years now. Initially I just used tubes of acrylic paint and decorated them by hand with uni posca paint markers and embellishments. However, I hated seeing the paintbrush streaks and my handwriting was never quite neat/"arty" enough for my liking. 

Irritating paintbrush streaks

Poor handwriting

I've tried a gizzilion different sorts of pens and finally decided that for a professional look I am best using wooden letters. The prices of these vary but the cheapest I've found them so far is about 20p for a 4cm letter. Alternatively you can buy pots of 250+ self adhesive letters from amazon in arial font. One of these pots do go quite a long way, but it may be more economical to just buy the single letters to spell the words that you want rather than having a mountain of qs and xs that you'll never use.

Plaque made

I discovered a great secret to avoiding paintbrush streaks too... using spray acrylic paint instead. They give great coverage, they dry really quickly and I find that they're actually much more economical as I'm not applying 3-4 coats. My favourite is Kobra, which I buy from Graff City. Fab range of colours and if you buy in bulk (6+ cans) they're a great price compared to tubes of paint.

The wooden plaques themselves I buy from ebay. Depending on how many you want and the size you want to work with I recommend contacting a few different sellers to see what they can offer you in terms of discounts and combined postage. 

I'm always trying new techniques and will gradually blog the different methods I use with mini tutorials and information on which materials I use and where I have found them from. In the mean time, here's a few pics from my earliest attempts at plaque making:

I learnt whilst making this plaque that you should lightly sand
acrylic paint where you intend to glue and embellishment
otherwise it wont stick as well. Love the sign, hate the writing.

I wish I had done the writing in white for this one. Love the
pink colour. Think the writing looks a little lost - a smaller
plaque probably would've been better. I like the handwriting
for 'smile' but then it went all horrible! :o)

I actually really like this one for some reason.
It is very basic in terms of skills, but there is something about
it that catches my eye.

My first ever craft fair