Meaningful and Custom Name Board

Yesterday I shared with you about the ultimate trade I made with my personal trainer friend Erin. We are currently working on decorating her son’s room as part of the trade. Her and her husband created the planked and shelved wall like I made for Isaac’s room. It looks awesome, but it needed some color and custom art.

Erin wanted some meaningful art for her 7-year old son’s room, one that was encouraging but also empowering. So she came up with this idea and I designed it in the Silhouette Studio program..

She found an old board in her garage and told me the measurements. I got to creating the custom piece in my Silhouette program, experimenting with different colors and fonts.

Click here to download it to use it as a template for your custom name sign.

We used the same process I used for the “I Pledge of Allegiance” piece I did back in July.

So the first thing we did was sand the board smooth and then painted it black. We used a foam roller to get good coverage.

Then we went over it with a sanding sponge to distress it just a little.

Then using my Silhouette Cameo machine I cut out the entire custom vinyl I created onto black contact paper. (Cheaper way to make stencils than using the premium vinyl). We removed all the letters with a stick pin or a Silhouette hook tool. Then we transferred the contact paper stencil onto the board.

It is very important to press the bubbles out so that there is a tight seal on the board. This helps the paint to not seep through.

Since white was the largest surface area of the letters, we taped everything else off and used light coats of white spray paint for that.

Tip: I suppose you could use spray paint for the whole thing but you would have to wait between coats and tape everything off. I found it easier to just move on and use a pouncer.

Next I moved onto the other colors using a pouncing sponge. I find using that is better than a brush because you don’t want to push paint under the vinyl/contact paper.

While it is all wet remove the rest of the contact paper stencil. Now everything won’t look perfect at this point. There is always a little bleed through….

I then lightly sanded the entire sign with a sanding sponge. That’ll rough everything up and make the bleed-through look more natural. I follow that up with touching up with a small paint brush any areas that didn’t look good to me.