DIY Distressed Sign

When I was home in April, my mom and I made a few decorative signs for the wedding. We're having a rustic, barn wedding, so we were going for the shabby look. 

The first step was to pry apart this old wooden pallet. The boards were naturally old and distressed, so we just sanded them a bit, washed them with soap and water, and left them in the 85 degree Georgia heat to dry.

Next, we painted each board with an antique, off-white matte paint. We just asked the fine folks at Home Depot to mix us up a small sample of this color. It was more than enough paint and only cost us $3. Just take a brush and paint the color almost all the way to the edges. Again, leave it out in the sun to dry. If you want it to look a bit more distressed, lightly sand the board after it dries.

Print out the words/phrases you want to create onto computer paper. We used the phrases "let's celebrate" and "oh happy day", but the possibilities are endless!  Get yourself some tracing paper (we used the fabric kind because we had it on hand), place the tracing paper face down on the board, place your printed phrase on top, and then use a pen to trace each word onto the board. You might want to use a few pieces of tape to hold the tracing paper and computer paper steady.

The last step is ridiculously easy - you just retrace the letters with a fine-tip Sharpie and color them in. For the sake of time, we used a larger Sharpie to color the letters in. That.is.all. I was afraid it would look super shiny, but it turned out great. Again, you could lightly sand it again to make it look even MORE distressed, but we didn't really need to!

And there you have it - all done and ready for the wedding. I also painted this "Welcome" sign to put beside the guest book, but I'm not super happy with it, so I think I'll re-do it next time I'm home. :)