DIY Family Name & Outline Sign

I've been wanting one of those awesome last name signs for forever.  You know the ones -- family's last name, date established -- super cute!  Instead of buying one, I decided to try to make one myself.  And then my plan was to buy a real sign because surely my own was going to be terrible.  Not because I'm not capable, but because I set my ambitions really high.  Because not only did I want a last name and established-on-date on my sign, I wanted our actual family on the sign.  (Well, we couldn't all fit on it, so I wanted our likeness on the sign.  That's probably an important clarification.)

How on earth did I plan on doing this?  Why by making my own stencil of we Geibs of course.  That's not complicated, right?  Actually... it's not.  I used FrogTape Delicate Surface Painter's Tape  (they didn't pay me or perk me to say that, but a girl can dream...).  I stuck three strips of tape on a sheet of wax paper with the strips slightly overlapping.  I picked out a favorite family picture of ours that I thought would translate well when outlined but had two main problems.

First, in the picture, Benjamin is holding Harrison, so all that would show up of our awesome baby boy was a smudge of foot and a balled up hand.  Obviously that's not a fair representation of Harrison and it made Benjamin look like had some strange growths protruding from his body.  So as weird as it felt, I trimmed Harrison out of the outline.  Then I simply looked up another picture of him that I liked (and that showed more than one elbow and a foot).  Essentially, I needed a picture of him all by himself.  Mission accomplished.  It was a little tricky trying to shrink him down to an appropriate size so that he would fit in with the rest of us in the picture, but only took a couple of re-sizing attempts thanks to print preview.

Second, since our dog, Boone, is a loved member of our clan too, I wanted to include him on the sign.  He's not full grown yet, but I wanted him to be in the picture, so I use a picture I had of his grandfather.  Like I did with Harrison's picture, I played around and re-sized the picture until it looked right proportionally to the rest of us.

Once I had our happy family picture all ready to go, I simply placed my painter's tape (which was pressed onto wax paper) on top and traced our outlines with a pencil.  Easy-peasy.  It helped that the painter's tape I used was yellow and very easy to see through, since it was easier to trace with the picture under the tape/wax paper than above it!  (Putting the picture under the wax paper and affixing both it and the tape/wax paper to the table with a piece of painter's tape kept it from shifting as I traced.)  I imagine that with a darker color like green or blue, this step could be harder.

Look, it's what we would look like if we had another baby!  In all seriousness, I took this picture right before I slipped the picture underneath the tap/wax paper stencil base and started tracing.

I followed the same process with the letters and numbers I wanted on the sign.  I picked out my favorite font, played around with size and then printed out my favorite combination.  Place, trace, happy face!

Then came the part where I hated my life and my choices.  Cutting Out.  I think that my scissors are just terrible.  Cutting us out made my hand feel like it was going to fall off.  Seriously, I think that was just because my scissors hate life.  Anyway, family members, letters and numbers were finally cut out and I had two seemingly crippled excuses for hands.  I'm pretty sure my thumb had bruises from the scissor handles.

Outlined Geibs

Using a scrap of wood in our garage from a different project that was already pre-sanded, I painted the board white.  I let it dry overnight and then placed my stencils on it (leaving on the wax paper backing!)  I mainly just wanted to figure out what kind of spacing I wanted on the board.  I didn't need for it to be mathematically perfect, but I did want it to look nice.  When I got the spacing just so, I grabbed a pencil, a tape measure and a straight edge.  I made three horizontal lines, where I wanted the outlines of us, our last name and our established-on date to go.  I figured having a line would help guide me with stencil placement and everything from looking too wonky.

It was time to go ahead and stick those stencils to the board.  After all of the time I spent cutting out my stencils, I was really hoping that this step would go okay.  One unintended bit of awesomeness that happened was that my painter's tape was overlapping on the wax paper.  This meant that unsticking the painter's tape from the wax paper was super easy whereas if I hadn't done that, finding an edge to separate the two would have proven tricky.  Possible, yes, but tricky since the stencil was very lightweight and flimsy.  As soon as there was a starting point to pull the tape and wax paper apart, they separated very easily.

Getting things lined up and stuck on!

Stencils placed on the board, I took a deep breath.  Pretty good so far!  Firmly pressing the edges of my homemade stencils down with my finger a few times, I used the white base paint and dabbed all around the edges of the stencils with a painting sponge.  I then smoothed out the dabs with a stroke of the sponge so that the texture wouldn't be bumpy.  The reason for this step is that you're essentially sealing the lines of your stencil.  Any paint that leaks under matches your base coat and the paint layer nicely seals down the edges of your stencil.  So when you go over it (after the sealing paint has dried of course) with your top paint color, your stencil lines should be pretty crisp.  I didn't take pictures while doing that step, but here are a few pictures from another project I'll be posting later this week that demonstrate this process:

Press those lines down!

Dab, dab, dab!

Smoothing the line out!

I chose a deep teal as my sign's paint color and painted two coats.  I may have panicked a bit after all of that work, thinking of what either a colossal success or colossal failure I had on my hands.  For me, DIY sometimes means Do It Yourself but it also sometimes means Destroy It Yourself.  I'm not kidding... you just wait until I post a good ole Destroy It Yourself project later this week!

It's best to not let your paint dry before removing the painter's tape.  Waiting until it dries can sometimes cause the tape to pull up some of the paint as you remove it, messing up your hopefully perfect lines.  With that in mind, I grabbed a pair of Ben's tweezers and once again thanked my lucky stars that my stencils had seams.  Having a seam gave me an easy place to grab with the tweezers at the inside of the stencil instead of the edge (where I would have worried that the tweezers could accidentally scrape the paint in a way that could mess up my lines!)  Pulling off the stencil was super easy.  It came off very cleanly and my lines were nearly perfect.  Not 100%, but close!

To fix the less-than-perfect areas, I simply took a toothpick, lightly dipped it into a little bit of paint (white in my case) and gently dabbed at the imperfect areas.  This allowed me to fix these tiny areas with very little effort and very little chance of messing things up.  Whereas if I had used a paint brush, I surely would have probably messed up the line instead of fixing it.

After letting my sign dry and doing probably the world's most embarrassing happy dance, I used a Rustoleum semi-gloss finishing spray clear coat to make the sign look polished and done.

Holy cow, my project turned out!

There are probably other products I could have used (like contact paper stencils!) to make this project a lot easier, but I really wanted to make my sign with things I had on hand.  Because I used things I already had (most of the supplies were leftovers from other projects sitting in our garage), my only out of pocket expense was the paint itself.  I knew I wouldn't need much, so I bought an 8oz sample jar of the paint for $2.49 plus tax.   Not bad, right?!  Much, much cheaper than the ones I found online that I liked (which didn't include our family outline) and far more personal since I made it with my own two (at times crippled-feeling) hands.

Doing any DIY projects yourself?  Do-It-Yourself or Destroy-It-Yourself?  Please don't tell me I'm the one who does the latter...