Welcome to the blog! Guest Project

I hope you all noticed that I am going to start featuring your projects from my Friday party links whenever I can.  And my first victim,  uh, I mean guest is Erin from Lemon Tree Creations.

I love what she did with this thrift store find.  And, I was thinking this could be easily copied with two old weathered fence posts (keep an eye on the curbside spring cleaning left overs- I know I may have a sickness for reusing things).  Simply take a board to paint the sign on and wrap it with beat-up boards, nail around the edges and wa-la!

Without further adieu here is the project!

Erin from Lemon Tree Creations 
$1.00 Welcome Sign!!

Who would have thought that this old $1 Longaberger Basket sign could look so cool?  Even though I quickly grabbed it up from the thrift store, I had no idea that it had so much potential. 

 Whoever had painted it the first time around used some sort of crackle medium, because when I tried to paint over it, my paint became really transparent and slimy.  I painted 3 coats of white to try to cover up the dark red and blue paint, and ended up with a relatively blank slate to do some stenciling.  You could still see a little of the crackling, but it wasn’t nearly as big or obvious as it had been on the sign originally.  I printed off some different fonts and experimented with sizes up against the wood.  Once I found one I liked, I sprayed it with a tacky stencil spray so that it would stick to the wood. 

I then traced the outline of the letters on the back of the paper in pencil, stuck the paper where I wanted it to be on the sign, and scribbled over the front of the paper so that the letter outlines were lightly rubbed onto the sign.

I peeled the paper off and filled the letters in with a black acrylic paint.  I then lightly sanded over the letters in the direction of the wood grain with a coarse sand paper.  I stained the wood trim a dark oak color, and then painted over the letters and the white with an antique glaze, and quickly wiped it off.  This is what I ended up with.

The initial crackling came through beautifully once the wood was sanded a little bit, and the glaze filled the cracks in just enough to give it a perfect aged look.  I even ended up with several large cracks through the letters, like this one through the E and L that I love.

I started off with an old looking sign, and ended up with a sign that is old looking, but in a good way!

Isn't that cool?

I love the distressed look!  

If you want to check out more of their projects 

go to Lemon Tree Creations!  

Thanks for linking up to the party Erin!

If you too would like to have a project featured, either link up to Friday's party or send me an email with the link to your project, so I can consider posting it!  Thanks!