A quick craft

I first need to give credit where credit is due...I found this idea on Pinterest, here is the direct link to the blog it came from.  With a ton of ideas all around the internet, no "craft" project really belongs to one person, however, giving a shoutout for a great idea and a tutorial like this is only right when using it on your own blog.

I've long admired those wooden painted signs with clever sayings or names on them, especially the more rustic ones.  I've had my eye out for a really beat up plank of wood to do it on and actually found some, but time got away from me and couldn't go pick them up.  So, a quick stop at Lowes got me these type of boards:

Actually, this was one board I had cut into 3 pieces.  I think the whole slab of wood was, um....about $4.50! 

Earlier in the day, I decided I was going to use my friend El as my guinea pig, even though she doesn't know it yet.  Well, maybe she does if she reads this before I see her tomorrow.  She has twin boys who are almost exactly one year younger than Emma, so I thought it would be neat to test this out using thier names in opposite colors.  So, I got on the computer and found a font I like, blew it up to about 150, then printed them out.

I painted one board ASCP Graphite and the other Old White, just one coat.  After it dried, I took my ballpoint pen and traced over the letters on the wood.  After finishing this, my suggestion would be to press REALLY hard to get a nice dip in the wood to avoid some of the mess I made.  Can you see the outline on this:

Make sure you click on the pic to make it larger, but I can see it on my screen, hope you can!

After tracing onto the wood, I  painted in the letters in the opposite color:

Although at first glance the letters look pretty good, it's a bit messy.  I would suggest getting a very thin strong paintbrush for the letters, not raid your little one's art supplies, like I did!  So, what's a girl to do when her paint is a bit messy??  Distress it of course!  The sandpaper helped me sand away some "oops" lines, especially since it was ASCP and I only used one coat.  Although I wasn't planning on it, I got out the wax because after sanding, the Graphite gets a whitish hue all over it and needs to be spruced back to life.  So, after the clear wax, I gently brushed on dark wax and quickly wiped away to just leave a small trace of it.  I'm so glad I did that because it really aged the look it since I couldn't go buy my pretty piece of already aged wood.  Here they are finished...not bad for my first try, huh?

Since my crappy camera ran out of batteries AGAIN, these are all taken with my cell.  I really hope you can tell the difference between the last two pics!