Warm Christmas Welcome Sign

Hey friends! Right now, I’m in my all time favorite city, New York City. I love everything about it from the hustle and bustle to the peaceful serenity you feel strolling in Central Park. From the bright lights of Time Square to the quiet areas of Soho and Noho and the Village. D asked me why I love this city so much and after a moment I replied with this. This is a city where you can be whoever you are and feel 100% accepted. I walk these streets and feel no judgement or stares. Just busy people doing their thing. The streets are gritty, not perfectly clean, and I love that. I love that there is everything you need and everyone you could possibly think of meeting in one city.

When we arrived there was a good layer of snow covering everything but by late afternoon, most has melted away.  We joined D’s parents and his brother and his girlfriend. I truly love spending time with my in-laws and always look forward to seeing them. I’m sure we will eat plenty of good food and walk a ton. The food always taste so much better when you’ve worked a little for it.

Interestingly, I was in NYC this exact same weekend four years ago. It too, fell on the heels of an election and the city was buzzing but not just from that. All around us, from department stores to the city street lights, everywhere was getting ready for the most magical time of year. Christmas!

I’ve been trying to slow my roll on all the Christmas stuff around house in order to not be sick of it by Christmas day, but I’ve managed to make a few things and today I want to share one of them. As I mentioned when I shared my Rustic Christmas Ornaments, I’m going for a rustic country Christmas theme this year. I also happened to get the Silhouette Cameo for my birthday back in September and although it took me a bit to learn how to use it (still have a lot to learn), I’ve managed to make a few things such as this sign below.

To make this sign I started with two wood boards that I picked up at Micheal’s for about $3.99 total. They were originally the color of plywood but I stained them using Red Mahogany and Ebony but for future projects, I’ll probably just use Dark Walnut as it ends up being roughly the same color.

I then used my Silhouette to create the Warm Christmas Welcome out of vinyl, adjusting the sign and font several times until I got it exactly how I wanted it to look.

One word of advice, when printing a word in cursive on vinyl be extremely careful when separating the two layers. The sticky part will fold in on           itself and it’s very hard to separate them agin. It may be easier to unfold about a half an inch of one side and get it to adhere to the wood and slowly unfold the rest. Once I had it where I wanted it, I went over it firmly to make sure there were no pockets.

I used an acrylic white paint and a dauber and went over the vinyl cutout. It dried pretty quick and then I removed the vinyl attached to the wood.

I lightly went over it with sand paper but was pretty happy with it to begin with so I didn’t do to much.

And that was that!

I have several more signs in the works and I’m so excited to play around with other fonts and stains. What do you think?

 I’m linking up to some of the following found here as well as TipJunkie, The Shabby Creek Cottage,  Today’s Creative Blog,  Home Stories A to  Z, The Shabby Nest, My Repurposed Life, Funky Junk Interiors,Thrifty Decor Chick, Between Naps on the Porch, Live, Laugh, Rowe