Ready for some easy DIY farmhouse LOVE? We know you all love Fixer Upper and Joanna and farmhouse as much as we do, so we teamed up with Canon and the awesome Lauren from Bless’er House to create some painted farmhouse signs (and don’t worry, we’ll hook you up with the free printable templates, too!)
All it takes is some wood, a bit of paint, and a printer (like our great Canon PIXMA MG7720 printer), and you can pretty much make any kind of farmhouse sign you’d like cheaply and easily.
Lauren made several signs for her home to show off this easy as pie printed-to-painted rustic sign technique, so we’ll turn it over to her to give you the how-to.
How to Make a Painted Farmhouse Sign (the easy way!)
We were blessed with this pile of reclaimed wood from my husband’s parents that they dug out of their barn. Maybe some would call it gross, but I call it gorgeous!
We gave it all a deep deep cleaning though, so they were ready for a new life as signs.
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Supplies used:
- Wood plank (size of your choice)
- Paint
- Paint brush
- Computer printer (we recommend the Canon PIXMA MG7720 printer)
- Cardstock paper
- Templates: you can use mine or create your own
- Utility knife
- Painter’s tape
- Mouse sander
- Coarse or medium grit sanding pads
- Hanging kit (we used one like this)
You can choose to leave your wood raw, but for our large kitchen sign, I decided a crisp white would be pretty in our space. So I gave my entire 1″x12″x8′ plank a base coat of paint.
To create the letters, I made my own stencils by printing the letters I needed on cardstock.
*Ink Saving Tip!!
Since the letters will be cut out, simple use the plain paper setting in draft mode to save a bit on ink. The outline of the letters will still be nice and crisp!
You can just use Microsoft Word or Picmonkey.com to design your words or letters on a page to print, or if you want a sign just like mine, get the templates here for the farmers market and welcome signs. If you want to make similar signs: For the welcome sign, I used the font Playball. And for the farmers market sign, I used League Gothic. For the date sign, I used Montserrat.
Then, I used a utility knife to cut out my letters to create the stencil (I like having a piece of cardboard underneath to protect my table as I cut). If you planned on using your stencil more than once, you could laminate your cardstock pages before cutting to get multiple uses out of them.
I positioned the stencils where I wanted on my wood plank and taped them down with painter’s tape to keep them steady while I painted on the letters in black.
The best way I’ve found to get crisp letters without a lot of bleeding under the stencils is by pouncing my brush rather than sweeping it back and forth.
As soon as you’ve painted the letters, you can remove the stencils.
When the paint is completely dry, turn on your mouse sander and start distressing. You can choose to distress a little or a lot depending on your style. The more distressing you want, the more coarse your sandpaper should be.
I focused on roughing up the edges and corners of the sign as well.
Once I attached my hanging kit, my husband and I hoisted it up on our kitchen wall. (We hung it using a french cleat style hanger, like this.) Best of all, this project for us was completely free! Gotta love using recycled and leftover project materials.
It really does seem like it was made for the awkward space above our cabinets. Oh wait… it was! Ha!
(You can see all the details about our kitchen makeover here if the rest catches your eye.)
I’ve ended up enjoying making these signs so much that I dove back into our wood pile and made two more using stenciling techniques from printed paper.
I added a sign with our daughter’s birthdate to our living room gallery wall (that I swear is finished now).
And our front porch wreath got a little greeting added to it.
I love how you can put them just about anywhere.
You can see a full demonstration of how I made the two little signs in this video too — please give it a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the Remodelaholic channel on YouTube!
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Didn’t Lauren do an amazing job? This is my new favorite way to decorate above kitchen cabinets!
We are so happy to be working with Canon this year to bring you all some easy do at home printer projects to make your home beautiful or your life a little bit easier and happier. Please help us share the word about these fabulous projects by sharing on Pinterest or Facebook! And check out the Canon PIXMA MG7720, it is a beautiful and USEFUL addition to any office or craft room.
See more of our Canon projects plus all of our free printables HERE
free printable flower garland set
printable gift tags for birthday and just because
free printable hand-drawn feathers
printable poster: but first, kisses
The post How to Make Painted Farmhouse Signs the Easy Way appeared first on Remodelaholic.
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Can’t wait to see more designs of house name plaques!!!
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