JOY Christmas Sign

I remember seeing a sign similar to this floating around the internet last year. I ran out of time to make one last year, so I grabbed a big scrap of plywood from my husband's scraps, and put the board in my holiday storage closet so that this year I could actually make myself that sign. When I pulled out my holiday decorations, I noticed the board and was excited to get working on the project. It was EASY. So easy. And absolutely no cost. I used scrap wood and paint I already had. Yay!

I left the plywood the size it was when I found it, but it could be made in any size that works for your home. I painted the wood a creamy white. It only took a couple of coats of paint, and dried quickly.

I didn't want it to be perfect, like it would be if I had made templates with my Silhouette, so I just decided how tall I wanted my letters, and drew block letters on craft paper. I made sure the letters were all the same height and that the thickness was pretty close to the same for each letter.

I cut the craft paper letters out and laid them on the board until I liked their positioning. I taped them in place so they wouldn't shift around while tracing them. I just used a regular pencil and traced the letters onto the board.

After tracing, I followed the pencil line with a paintbrush, using red paint. You can see here that I basically outlined the letter first, and then filled it in afterwards.

The letters took just a couple coats of red paint. I wasn't really concerned with them being perfect. I just did my best with my paintbrush, and that was plenty good enough for this project!

After the paint dried, I took my electric sander to it to give it some age. And then I used a little bit of glaze and rubbed it on all over the sign, rubbing it off with a cloth almost simultaneously with rubbing it on.

Then, I coated the whole thing with three coats of exterior varnish, and that's it! It was super simple, and didn't require me to go out and buy anything at all. (Oh, how I love that kind of project!)