DIY Wood Beach Sign

Yesterday I decided to put my new {old} projector to work and make a beach sign using some reclaimed wood from the 1800s. I bought the projector off craigslist and it may be old school, but it works! The wood I used was purchased from a store near Athens, GA that I talk about in this post about my “Love you to the Moon and Back” sign.

The first thing I did for my sign was play around with various fonts before deciding on heartquake, which I downloaded for free from dafont.com. I then added my own arrowheads and arrow to the mix and after I was happy with the way it looked, I printed it out on a sheet of vellum paper. I wasn’t too sure how the vellum paper would work but didn’t have any transparency paper on hand so I figured it was worth a shot.

Here is the reclaimed wood that I wanted to use – I LOVE the colors and isn’t that knot awesome?! The edge was actually realllly sharp though so we had to saw it down a bit.

DIY Wood Beach Sign

The vellum paper worked surprisingly well and once I set up my wood and had the projector in place, I taped the vellum paper down so it wouldn’t move while I was tracing it onto the board. I will say that it wasn’t super clear, although it did get more clear when I made it smaller. I would think that this is where the transparency paper would make a difference, but it still worked pretty decently. Don’t know if I would recommend using vellum paper for a more detailed project though. I used a watercolor pencil to trace the letters and arrow onto the board.

After it was painted I sanded it down a bit to give it that distressed, I’ve been hanging at the beach and washed ashore look. Unfortunately, some of the pretty blue paint that was on the wood came off when I was sanding it, booooo. Next time I will be more careful. I then sealed the wood with polyacrylic and added a piece of blue rope I had leftover from my lampshade project.

And here is my new {old} wood beach sign up on the wall, yay! I LOVE making these signs. Think I’ll make some more and put them in my Etsy shop this weekend.

It’s funny but in this photo, you can actually see my DIY wood shim artwork on the left and rope mirror and lampshade on the right.

UPDATE: I have since moved the beach sign to be above my new beach inspired console table. Here is an updated photo:

So what do you think of the DIY wood beach sign? Now that my third ship helm is being used as a nautical wreath, I had to do some re-arranging with the other helms and think this is a good spot for them.. for now anyway.