All You Need is Love Sign- From Scrap Wood

by ilene on March 27, 2012 · 1 comment

I’ve been saving this 4 feet x 18 inch scrap piece of wood for almost a year. It’s leftover wood from the back of this wood mirror frame that I made last year. It’s nothing fancy, just a piece of cheap plywood, but I knew I could use it for something one day. Jeff almost threw it away when we moved across the country last summer, but I insisted on bringing it with us to San Francisco. He thought I was nutso (again) and because we had nowhere to store it in our small city apartment, it was stuffed behind our washer/dryer for the past half year and forgotten. Because we are renting our apartment, I haven’t really put much effort in to decorate it all that much. Our walls are pretty bare so I unearthed the scrap piece of wood and decided to try painting the scrap wood and hang it up in our living room. It’d be a cheap way to decorate! I decided on the words “All You Need is Love” because I thought it was a sweet sentiment.

First, I spray painted an even coat of white primer on the wood:

Since I’m terrible at freehand painting, I used my silhouette machine to cut out the giant letters for “LOVE” (with a giant heart for the “o”) out of black vinyl and stuck it onto the surface:

I wanted a distressed, uneven look so instead of using paintbrushes, I used a kitchen sponge to add more texture to the paint. I mixed up different shades of gray paint and just dabbed all over the surface, with darker gray around the edges:

Then I peeled off the black vinyl letters which left a white relief of the letters behind. My handwriting is actually pretty similar to the font used for the “All you need is” letters, but I didn’t trust myself to paint it freehand, so I found a font that was similar to my writing and printed out the words on my printer. I taped the print outs all together, placed it where I wanted them to be and traced the letters onto the wood canvas using graphite paper:

The graphite paper leaves a pencil-like outline behind:

And then all I had to do was paint in between the lines:

I let the paint dry overnight and used wood glue to hang 2 picture hooks to the back of the wood and hung it up!

Ta-da!! It’s not perfect but it makes me smile whenever I see it! The whole project cost me $0 since I used materials that I already had. That makes me smile even more!!