DIY Painted Wood Sign Using a Vinyl Stencil and Your Cricut!

Hello craftsmen, today what I am going to show you is how to paint a

vinyl

stencil

on a piece of

wood

. What you're going to need today is

your

stencil

, obviously, so we cut this stencil in the last video I posted just a couple of days ago, so if you need to know how to cut a

vinyl

stencil

using

your

Cricut machine, check out that video. You'll also need some transfer tape to place your stencil on the

wood

. You're going to need some paint. I'm

using

this artist's level one acrylic paint from Michael's. You really need some brushes.

I personally like to use these foam brushes and then I like to have a few small brushes on hand just if I need them. do any touch ups some scissors because why scissors because just in case you need them and a scraper your weeding tool just in case and a tape measure to measure where you want your template and a pencil to make some marks so let's get started This wood is just one piece than I think I bought from Home Depot. It was in the paneling section so they only have a few sheets of what this is a very thin piece so I thought it would be a good piece so I clean it up on a shelf. or something like that, first things first, so we have our template here, so we're going to need to take our transfer tape and put it on the template to put the template on the wood that I'm using.

I think this is the Oracle transfer tape I like. the Cricut one too, but I like this one because I can get it in bulk. I think I got a 50 foot roll from Amazon, so I use that quite a bit, so we're going to want to grab our transfer tape. I'm going to save this cutout because this is how I'm going to put my panel in later, so we're going to put in our template. Sorry, our transfer tape on our template and you'll want to make sure you put this on in one go. glide because if you make a mistake it's hard to get it back off without ruining your jig, so I usually like to start in the middle and then work my way out.

I'm going to scrape this off to make sure it picks up my template. How cute, my boyfriend. He's going out to buy sushi right now, so I'm hoping I can make it before he gets home, so I'm going to trim off this excess vinyl here. See, I told you these scissors would be useful only from the top. Here I want. to trim this down a little bit, obviously I didn't really measure my transfer tape, so now we're going to want to remove the transfer tape and the vinyl. Sometimes I use my weeding tool to start, but sometimes I'm so stubborn, so let's remove our transfer tape.

I like to turn it around. I think it makes it easier, so if your template sticks to the paper, don't worry, just have a little patience and keep working. Put it back on the transfer tape just to get it working a little. That's something I've really learned: crafting and using this Cricut. In general, just being patient takes the fun out of it if you get frustrated, I mean, trust me. I get frustrated and use a lot of bad language, ask Joe. I've cursed and cried a lot over the last six months, almost a year, I've had my Cricut, so it's been a journey, but it's also been fun.

We are just taking our stand or sorry, we are withdrawing our support from our staff. I originally bought my Cricut to literally make a thing for my best friend who was getting married. She was making him some champagne glasses and I bought her my cricket and I thought, oh I'm going home and I'm going to break all these champagne glasses, yeah, anyone who has a cricket knows that didn't happen at all. I was on YouTube probably like um three four hours and probably a couple of days. After that I tried to figure out what the heck I got myself into so now we have our template on our transfer tape so we're ready to go and I actually forgot to measure this to see where I want it so that was bad. me, but I'll lightly leave it there for just a second.

I'm not going to water it down just to see where it goes. You know, I really felt like I was missing a step, but that's actually pretty accurate. I can just move this over a hair and then it's about three inches so it can move up a little bit and honestly I'm not looking for perfection when I'm crafting, I just want it to look good so I don't try to do that. I beat myself up about whether it's half an inch to one side or not, as long as it looks good and my customer, whoever buys it or whoever gives it to, is happy, that's fine, so now we have this where we want it and Now I'm going to smooth this down to the wood and again I like to start in the middle because it's easier to get out, so we're going to smooth this out to make sure you can get all the air bubbles out while it's underneath. this transfer tape we want it to not bleed so we want this to be as smooth as possible so I think that's pretty good so now we're going to remove the transfer tape from our stencil and again you want to Don't do this step by step turtle but a little bit slow because you want to make sure that this stencil doesn't peel off at all or have too many bubbles and that's what I like to put my hand in here, you know, on the transfer. tape as I pull because I feel it softens it as I go.

I don't know if that actually does anything, but I feel like it does, so I'm going to go ahead with this transfer. transfer tape now I'm going to go back and make sure everything is smooth and be careful doing this without the transfer tape on top because you don't want to snag any of these little pieces here, we just want to be nice, but I also don't want to bleed so now the fun part we're going to start painting so let's get a piece of paper and we can put some paint on there so I'm using this level one acrylic paint from Artist Loft that I got this from.

Michaels I like this paint because I feel like I only apply Co or two with a needle. I don't need to put too many layers on it because I know that sometimes some type of acrylic paint can be transparent, so this one that I really like, I think it's pretty solid, so I'm going to pour some paint on there, grab my foam brush , so first I like to start with a relatively dry brush, so I'm not going to put too much paint in here, just enough. to cover it because I'm not going to modify this and I know some people like to put Mod Podge on it and I love modifying podge for other things, but I've noticed that with my paint it tends to do that when I peel it off.

I removed the stencil after I had

painted

and there is Mod Podge underneath, if the Mod Podge is too dry or dry in general it will peel the paint off the wood and it will look very messy and I don't like it so I won't modify the podge, so I just need to be very patient, so we'll start painting this again. I don't have too much paint here, it's like fresh and dry, so I'll go over it and We'll go over this again, so if it really looks light and not solid, don't worry, we'll go over this again and that's how I got lucky with my

sign

. wood, so this is not the most difficult and fast. rule anyway that's how I like to do it it's so nice so I can come home from work and just paint it's very relaxing as long as everything cooperates it's relaxing if nothing cooperates that's very stressful okay so now let's do this together again time, just a little bit of paint here just to make it work because you can always add paint.

I mean, it's obviously impossible to remove and you don't want to touch it up too much afterwards. because then you get rid of those sharp lines that you worked really hard for, so now it's pretty much covered, so now I'm going to come back with more paint and I'm going to go over this again a little bit more solid this time and I'm doing brush strokes. I know some people like to rub and that's okay too. This is what has worked for me, so let's review. It's so nice once you take the

sign

off or this stencil and there's like these nice crispy, crunchy, crunchy lines because it's always a little bit of a gamble, it depends on the wood you have, it depends on the weather, you know if it's wet, if it's dry , whether it's hot or cold, most of the time you can make it pretty.

It's very predictive of what you'll get, but sometimes the final wood paint just has a mind of its own, like our cricket machines, but sometimes it just does what it wants and doesn't care if you have a client or a deadline, it just does. what you want, so I'm going to make sure to peel the stencil when it's wet, so I'm going to go over this one more time, just a little bit, to make sure it's wet. I don't like. to peel off a dried stencil or once the paint is dry because then the paint will peel or crack or just not give you those crisp lines so that's okay I think it looks pretty solid so now it's time for the Right, let's peel this off. so we're going to peel slowly, gently, we want crisp, crisp lines, so I'm not going to force anything if the stencil breaks, okay.

I can go back to using my weeding tool later and sometimes I end up with this huge piece of vinyl and it's just kind of hard to work with, so now I have paint all over my hand and now we could just go in and gently remove it because, again, we still don't want, we don't want the paint to chip or peel, just be patient and honestly, sometimes if the paint peels or chips or whatever, just make it rustic, who cares ? Just make it look rustic and sand it down a bit, that's at the moment anyway so it's fine. my weeding tool just did that, but that's okay, so another thing to keep in mind, so if your weeding tool gets paint on it like mine did, it'll go away now that I have paint on my hands.

I'm just making a mess, but it's I'm going to mark your wood, so be careful with that, but the nice thing about acrylic paint is that it's water soluble, so sometimes what I like to do is take a Q-tip or something like that and just work around it. These little areas that turned a little white are no big deal, so now you have a beautiful wooden sign that you can sell, give to someone, or hang in your own home, so I hope this was helpful. Guys, if it was like this, please give me a like, leave me a comment, subscribe, also follow me on Instagram, it's in the craft highlight cuts and I hope to see you in my next tutorial, happy crafting.