How to Perfectly Paint Wood Signs with Make Vinyl Stencils Made on Your Cricut

- Hello everyone. My name is Jennifer Maker. Today I'm showing you how to

make

a

vinyl

stencil to

paint

a

wood

sign with crisp lines at The Great Maker Show & Tell. (upbeat music) One of the most popular home trends these days is

wood

en

signs

with names or phrases or whatever is actually written on them. And they are actually very easy to

make

and customize. Last year I showed you how to apply

vinyl

to a wood sign. My welcome sign there. And you have

made

so many beautiful posters. But there is another way to make wooden

signs

. You can

paint

them to give them a more natural realistic look.

Now the first thing people think of when I say painted wood signs is hand painting and all the skill that goes into doing so. No no no. We will do it in a better way. We are going to use a vinyl template that we cut out on our Cricut cutting machines so we can paint exactly what we want, no more, no less. Now, one of the challenges when applying paint to a wood sign is bleeding. It can be tricky to get the paint to go exactly where you want it and not bleed under the stencil. Wooden signs often have uneven surfaces and this can cause the paint to bleed.

Or it is more likely to bleed. But I know a secret and it's called Mod Podge. A little bit of matte Mod Podge on the stencil before painting will do wonders. And I'll show you how to do it in this tutorial. It is easy. So for this vinyl stencil technique, you will need permanent adhesive vinyl in any color, matte Mod Podge. Do not use glitter. Acrylic paint, wooden sign. I'm using this 12-by-6-inch wooden board that comes pre-strung with string. But you can use any board that has a flat surface or can be flattened with sandpaper.

You'll probably want to sand and stain it to prepare

your

sign ahead of time. You know, you don't have to stain it. You'll probably also want to seal the wood after painting it. Other things that come to mind that are useful are brushes, cosmetic sponges, and weeding tools. And of course, you'll want

your

Cricut cutting machine. I put together three stencil designs to show you how to cut, apply, and paint your stencil. And you can use any or all of them for your projects. The designs for all of these wood signs, both the ones you see here and an extra one, are on my blog at www.JenniferMaker.com.

Let me show you where to find them and put it all together so you can make your own custom wood sign. The first step is to get my free wood sign SVG files so you can create your own amazing wood sign. I keep all my free files on my blog at www.JenniferMaker.com. Simply head there and look for the red bar at the top of the screen. And under libraries, click enter library. If you don't have a password yet, you can get one for free on the same page. Once you're inside the library, the quickest way to find any file you're looking for is to search for it on the page.

So command F or control F. And I recommend you look at the wooden sign. You are looking for vinyl

stencils

for wood signs. And you just click on that link there. And it is downloaded to your computer or device. And you can go ahead and open it. And this is what the files look like inside. There are SVG, DXF and PDF. The SVG is what we are going to work with today. And now I'm going to show you how to upload it to Cricut Design Space. So for step two, you will prepare your template design file for cutting.

We will do this in Cricut Design Space. Let's upload that file that we just downloaded. Then we click upload. And upload an image and browse. And let's look for the SVG file. And click open. Once it uploads, click save to save it to your Cricut Design Space account. And then select it and click insert images to place it on your canvas. This is what it looks like when it first appears. I'm going to make the screen a little smaller so we can see everything. There are three designs here. "Happiness is home

made

." "Dear Santa, define naughty." And joy".

You can choose what you want to make or, of course, design something completely yourself. I'm going to make the happiness is homemade poster. That's why we want to hide or eliminate the others that we don't need. The easiest way to do this is to simply go to the layers panel and click on the eye icon to hide the ones we don't plan to cut. So. So we are left with "Happiness is homemade." Let me make this a little bigger. You could really go ahead and crop it as is. It's already the right size for the sign I plan to use it for.

Now, you should double check the size of your sign to be sure. If you need to resize it, you can use the resize handle here in the corner to make it bigger or smaller. And let me undo that. Now we are making a template. And the

stencils

will behave a little differently than regular vinyl. Because we're going to weed the opposite of what we would normally do in a jig. And I'll show you. But to make it easier for me and to make it easier to center my template on my board, I like to create a bounding box that is the same size as my board.

And to do that, just click on the shapes and click on the square. And then you want to size the square so that it is the same size as your sign. So my sign is, and I'm going to size it here so it's exact. It is 12 inches wide. And I think it's 5 1/2 inches tall. So I need to click on the lock icon up here at the top. And then I can change the sizes independently of each other. So I'll change the height to 5 1/2 inches. This is the size of my sign right now. So I'm going to change this color just because it helps me visually.

And I'm going to send it back so I can see it. So awesome. This is what my poster will look like. And you can see that it's not centered right now on my poster. Let's change that. Select both layers. So your sign layer and the square or rectangle you just made. And go to the alignment menu and choose center right here. And your rectangle and your design will be centered

perfectly

. You don't have to guess. Now if we attach these two layers, we won't even have to click anywhere other than clicking attach. Just like this. We understand this and this will fit our needs

perfectly

.

And you will have a template that you can align directly on your board without any problems or guesswork or anything like that. Alright. Then all we have to do is click create it. Now, since my board is 12 inches long and I choose to make that box, my template is also too long for my cutting mat. Which isn't a big deal because I have a longer cutting mat. Just keep that in mind. If you don't have a longer cutting mat, you may not want to do it this way. But I do it. I'm going to click OK.

And thanks for letting me know, Cricut. And we don't make adhesive vinyl mirrors. So there's nothing to do here but click continue. And now we simply plug in our machine and choose our material. Click browse all materials. And I'm only going to look at vinyl. And here I just want to use premium vinyl. This is exactly what we want. And I'm going to click Done. And I like to put my pressure on more and that's it. That's all we have to do. Now let's go and cut this. Step three, cut out your custom vinyl template for your wood sign.

Using a standard grip green cutting mat, place the adhesive vinyl face up on the cutting mat. And load your fine point blade into your Cricut machine. Now just press the flashing button when you're ready to cut and give it a little time to do its job. When you are ready, unload the mat, turn it over and remove it from the vinyl. Step four, remove the design from the cut vinyl stencil. Now it's time to remove the excess vinyl from our template. But it's important to remember that stenciling is the opposite of a regular vinyl design because you will be painting your design on your board.

That means you're actually leaving out the negative spaces and removing the positive spaces. As you watch, you'll see that I'm removing what we would normally put in a thing. But we leave them here so our painting can come through, right? So it's quite the opposite. It's something negative that you would normally want to weed. Just keep that in mind and follow my example. And if it helps to think about it, remember, where will your paint go? Your paint will go to the places you are removing, right? So you want the paint to probably go where your letters or your images are.

So you remove your lyrics and your images while cleaning them. Now you want to put transfer tape on your project so we can transfer it to your wooden board. And I recommend that before you put the transfer tape on the vinyl, you stick it to your clothing so it's less sticky and easier to lift off when you go to add the vinyl to your wood sign. It'll just save you some headaches. It doesn't have to be super sticky. Step Five: Apply the vinyl stencil to your wood sign. Line up your vinyl on your wood sign. Because we made that bounding box the exact same size as our sign, all I have to do is place that piece of vinyl exactly under my sign, lining up the sides and bottom.

And I don't have to worry about it being centered because it already is. And use a scraper tool to apply the vinyl to the wood. It is important to scrape all edges of the vinyl very well because this will seal the vinyl to the wood. And you really want that to get those nice, crisp lines. When removing the transfer tape, be careful not to lift any of the inside parts of the letters. Just go slow and if you see any of those little bits lifting up, just put it back down. And then, you know, you may need to use the tip of a tool to make sure it comes off or stays or whatever in your design.

Step Six: Modify your vinyl template onto your wood sign. Using a brush, apply a coat of matte Mod Podge to your sign, right on top of your vinyl. You really only need to put it in the negative spaces, the places where the paint will go. Mod Podge helps prevent paint from seeping and bleeding under the vinyl. Now it doesn't need to be too thick here. But you should also be careful not to lose too much weight. What you see me doing here is perfect. However, it is now important that when you apply your Mod Podge, you make sure to cover it in all directions.

You want it to get into all the cracks. And Mod Podge is transparent. So if it bleeds under the vinyl stencil, we won't see it. So it's not a big deal. Now make sure to let this layer of Mod Podge dry completely before proceeding to the next step. I let my Mod Podge dry for an hour and it was actually dry long before that. It really depends on how much you put on and it also depends on the conditions of your environment. You can also let it dry overnight to be safe. Step seven, paint your wood sign.

Once your Mod Podge has dried, it's time to start painting. I like to use a paintbrush, specifically a stencil brush, to apply the paint. And I like to use the attack method. The skip method involves holding the brush straight up and down and applying it to the surface in up and down motions. You don't brush it into the crevices at all. This is a template technique. And this is one of the ways professional stencils achieve truly amazing results. The jump method. I'll show you, I'm going to hold the sign up so you can see it from the side.

So you see how I'm getting right to that. And I'm just touching the surface and then I go back up. It's like it bounces with the pressure. So it's jumping. I don't know if that's actually why it's called that. But that's how I think about it. It bounces back with a little pressure so that the paint stays there. And you just do that throughout your project. And it will leave a little texture, so you can use a cosmetic sponge to dab it lightly to smooth things out. Do not brush with the cosmetic sponge. Just give it a few touches.

Then you too are jumping with the sponge. It just has a more uniform surface. Just make sure you paint all the negative areas. So all your letters and all your images. And wait for the paint to dry before moving on to the next step. My paint dried in two hours. So it didn't take long. Of course, you can let it sit longer if you wish. And you can also add an extra layer if necessary. Now, one coat will give it a sort of transparent, aged look, which I really like, especially for a wood sign. But if you want something more solid, you can apply two or even three coats.

Just make sure to keep those coats light. It really depends on the style you prefer. Step eight, remove the vinyl stencil. Once the paint has dried, slowly and carefully remove the vinyl stencil. Removing vinyl in the opposite direction of the wood grain helps prevent unwanted paint from lifting. Use a weeding tool to remove the vinyl from the inside of the letters. I had no problems removing any of my vinyluntil I got to the center of my letters and the Mod Podge had it sealed so well that sometimes I had to dig. And so, in a couple of corners, you know, there's a little bit of a hole where I really wanted to dig with my weeding tool.

Just keep that in mind. Now, I'm not a particularly good weeder. You may be much better than me at that. But that was the only problem I had with this project. And honestly, now that the vinyl is removed, I can't even see those little gaps where I had to work really hard to get the centers out. Now, there may be times when the paint lifts when removing the vinyl from the sign. If this happens, it's an easy fix, depending on how much paint has been lifted. So you can use a pin and dip it into the paint and then repair any spots that were raised when the vinyl was removed.

So, like in those places where I had those little gaps, I just took my brush and put a little bit of paint right there. To cover up, you know, where I dug my weeding tool. Alright. So here it is. It's finished. The template is off. And look at those beautiful crisp lines. It's just a sight to behold. They are so crispy and clean. And no caffeine. Haha just kidding. But seriously, they look fantastic and I love it. And I love this technique. And we made another sign. We dyed this one first. So you can see the difference between the one that doesn't stain and the one that stains you.

Well, the sign came with some stain but a more vibrant stain. Step nine, seal your wood sign. And if you want, you can seal your wooden sign with a polyurethane spray. I sprayed mine with matte polyurethane because I wanted to preserve the worn, Old World look of this very quaint sign. But you could use glitter or satin if you wanted. The idea is that if you use acrylic sealer, it will protect your surface and last for many years. Wasn't that amazing? I was so impressed with the clean, crisp lines of the paint after removing the stencil that I had to take a photo as a close-up.

And this sign only took a few hours from start to finish. I wasn't even working on the sign the whole time. This was a fun project with amazing results. Just make sure you use that matte Mod Podge and make sure you use your attack method with your brush. And just think about the signs you can make now. If you have any questions about how to make or use vinyl stencils on wood, I want to help you. Leave your question below this video or ask it in our Cricut Crafters group at www.JenniferMaker.com/

cricut

crafters. There you will find a whole community of incredible crafters who will be happy to share their tips and ideas with you.

And don't forget to enter my Cricut giveaway happening right now. You can enter for a chance to win your very own Cricut cutting machine. Get all the details at www.JenniferMaker.com/

cricut

giveaway. And I think that's all for today. I'll be back tomorrow to show you a really cool and fun paper craft that my daughter is helping me design. And remember, I'm always open to your project ideas. If you can tell me what you want to do, I can show you how to do it. Until next time, it's Jennifer Maker reminding you to create the life you love. (brilliant music)