Wood Stain Stencil Sign

When I finally got around to decorating a lonely empty wall in our living room, I knew I wanted a big wood-tone statement piece to balance out the printer’s tray I wanted to use.

I decided on a twist on this common sign seen on pinterest. I love the double statement about believing there is good in the world and being that good. I definitely tend to want things to happen without actually doing anything about it, so this is a great reminder for me too 🙂

To make the sign, I got the following supplies from home depot (and I have most of each of the wood stain/paint supplies left over for future projects, yay!):

• 4×8 sheet of 1/4″ birch plywood: $
• wood conditioner:
• dark stain (color): $
• light stain (golden walnut): $
• test pot of white paint: $

I started by having Eddie help me cut the board down to 3′ x4′, and used the wood stain conditioner on the entire front of the plywood piece. I then stained the entire piece with the light stain. I cut out the letters I wanted to be the light wood color with my cricut, and made a grid using a ruler and masking tape for aligning the stenciled letters.

Once the letter stencils were applied (and the masking tape removed), I stained over the entire board with the dark stain, being careful to not let the stain get too thick around the edges of the letters. I had tried several techniques on my scrap piece of plywood for staining around the vinyl letter stencils: with/without conditioner (conditioner definitely helped), mod podge or wood glue to reduce bleeding (affected the stain in a not-good way), and more, but always got minor bleeding. The stenciled letters weren’t perfect, but they turned out pretty well (small imperfections add character and a hand-made touch, right?).

I then cut the rest of the letters out with my cricut on normal computer paper, and traced their outlines with a pencil. I painted them in with the white paint, but thought it was a bit too crisp. I ended up going over that area with the dark stain again. If I did this project again, I’d paint the white letters before doing the dark stain.

To finish it off, I painted the edges of the plywood with some black acrylic paint. I couldn’t nail any picture hangers to the back because it was only 1/4″ thick, so I used gorilla super glue (it says it bonds to wood and metal) to attach some saw-tooth picture hangers to the back (its been on the wall for about a month now with no problems!).