– Hello, everyone. My name is Jennifer Maker. Today, I am showing you
how to make a vinyl stencil to paint a wood sign with sharp lines on "The Great Maker Show & Tell". (bright music) One of the more popular
home trends these days are wood signs with names, or phrases, or whatever really on them. And they're really so easy
to make and personalize. Last year, I taught you how
to apply vinyl to a wood sign, my welcome sign over there. You guys have made so
many beautiful signs, but there's another way that
you can make wood signs. You can paint them to
give them a more natural sort of realistic look. Now the first thing
people think when I say painted wood sign is hand painting and all of the skill
that's required to do that.
No, no, no. We're going to do it a better way. We're going to use a vinyl stencil that we cut out on our
Cricut cutting machines so we can paint exactly what we want, no more and no less. Now one of the challenges
with stenciling paint on 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. Wood signs usually have uneven surfaces, and this can cause the paint to bleed, to more likely to bleed,
but I know a secret, and it's called Mod Podge. A little Matte Mod Podge on
your stencil before you paint will do wonders, and I'm going to show you how
to do that in this tutorial. It's easy. So for this vinyl stencil technique, you're going to need some permanent adhesive vinyl in any color, Matte Mod Podge, do not use glossy, acrylic paint, a wood sign. I'm using this 12 by six inch wood board that came pre-hung with a rope, but you can use any board
that has a flat surface or can be flattened with sandpaper.
You're probably going to
want to sand and stain it to prepare your sign in advance. You know, you don't have to stain it. You're going to want to
probably seal your wood afterwards you paint it as well. Other things that come to
mind that are useful are brushes, cosmetic sponges,
weeding tools and, of course, you're going to want your
Cricut Cutting Machine.
I have prepared three stencil designs to show you how to cut,
apply and paint your stencil. And you are welcome to use any or all of them for your projects. The designs for all of these wood signs, both of the ones you see
here and an extra one, are over at my blog at JenniferMaker.com. So let me show you where to find them and put it all together so you can make your own
customized wood sign. Your first step is to get
my free wood sign SVG files so you can create your
own awesome wood sign. I keep all of my free files on
my blog at JenniferMaker.com. Just head on over there and look for the red bar
at the top of the screen and under Libraries
click Enter The Library.
If you don't have a password yet for it you can get one free on the same page. Once you're inside the library the fastest way to find any
file that you're looking for is to search the page for it. So Command F or Control F and I recommend that
you search on wood sign. You're looking for vinyl
stencils for wood signs and you just click that link right there and it downloads to
your computer or device and you can go ahead and open it up and this is what the
files look like inside.
There's SVGs, DXFs and PDFs. The SVG is what we're
going to work with today and I'm going to show
you how to upload that to Cricut Design Space. So for Step 2 you're going to prepare your stencil design file for cutting. We're going to do this
in Cricut Design Space. We're going to upload that
file that we just downloaded. So we click on Upload, then
Upload Image and Browse. And we're going to 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 actually put it onto your canvas. This is what it looks like
when it first comes in. I'm going to make the
screen a little smaller so we can see everything. There's three designs in here, happiness is homemade, dear
santa, define naughty and joy. You get to choose what you want to make or, of course, design
something entirely yourself.
I'm going to make the
happiness is homemade sign. So we want to hide or delete the other ones that we don't need. The easiest way to do that is simply to go over to the Layers panel and click the eye icon to hide the ones that we're not planning
to cut, just like that. So we're left with happiness is homemade.
Let me make this a little bigger. You really could just go
ahead and cut it out as is. It's already sized for the
sign that I plan to use it for. Now you should double
check the size of your sign just to be sure. If you need to resize it you can use the Resize
handle here in the corner to move to make it bigger or smaller. And let me undo that. Now, we're making a stencil and stencils will behave
a little differently than normal vinyl will 'cause we're going to
be weeding the opposite of what we would normally
weed in a stencil and I'll be showing you that. But to make that easier on myself, and to make it easier to
center my stencil onto my board I like to create a bounding box that's the same size as my board and to do that you just click
on Shapes and click Square and then you'll want to size the square to be the same size as your sign. So my sign is, and I'm
going to size it up here so it can be exact, is 12 inches wide and, I believe, is 5 1/2 inches tall.
So, I need to click the Lock
icon right here at the very top and then I can change the sizes independently of one another. So I'll change the height to 5 1/2 inches. So this is what the size
of my sign, right now. So I'm going to change its color just because that helps me visually. And I'm going to send it
to the back so I can see. So, awesome, this is what
my sign would look like and you can see it's not
centered right now on my sign. We're going to change that. Select both of these layers, so, your sign layer and the square or rectangle that you just made and go to the Line menu and
choose Center right here and your rectangle and your design will center perfectly.
You don't have to guess at it. Now, if we attach these two layers, so we don't even have to click anywhere other than to click
Attach, just like this. We get this and this will cut
out perfectly for our needs. And you'll have a stencil that you can align right on your board without any issues or guessing
or anything like that. All right, so, all we have
to do is click Make It. Now, because my board is 12 inches long and I am choosing to make that box, my stencil is also a little bit too long for my cutting mat,
which is not a big deal, 'cause 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, I'm going to click OK. And thank you for warning me Cricut and we do not mirror adhesive vinyl. So there's nothing to do here other than click Continue.
And now we just connect our machine and we choose our material. Click Browse All Materials and I'm just going to search on vinyl and I just want to use
premium vinyl, right here. This is exactly what we want and I'm going to click Done. And I like to set my
pressure More and that's it. That's all we need to do. Now let's head over and cut this out. Step 3, cut out your custom vinyl stencil for your wood sign. Using a green standard grip cutting mat, place your 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 it's done, unload
the mat, flip the mat over and peel the mat away from your vinyl. Step 4, weed your cut
vinyl stencil design. Now it's time to take away the
excess vinyl from our stencil but it's important to
remember that a stencil is the opposite of a normal vinyl design because you're going to be painting your design onto your board.
That means that you are actually leaving the negative spaces and taking out the positive spaces. So as you watch you'll see here that I'm removing what we would normally be putting onto a thing but we're leaving them here so that our paint can come through, right? So it's the opposite. It's a negative of what you
would normally want to weed. Just keep that in mind and follow my lead.
And if it helps to think about it, remember where is your paint going to go? Your paints going to go into the places that you're removing, right? So, you want the paint to go probably where your letters are
and, or your image is. So you remove your letters and your images while you're weeding it. Now you'll want to put
transfer tape onto your project so we can transfer it to your wood board and I recommend that before you put your transfer tape onto your vinyl, stick it to your clothes
to make it less tacky and easier to lift when you go to add the vinyl to your wood sign. It'll just save your some headaches. You don't need it to be super sticky. Step 5, apply the vinyl
stencil to your wood sign. Line up your vinyl on your wood sign.
Because we made that bounding box that's the exact same size as our sign, all I have to do is
put that piece of vinyl exactly onto my sign, lining
up the sides and the 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's important to get all
of the edges of your vinyl scraped down really well because this will seal
your vinyl to your wood and you really want that
in order to get those nice, sharp lines. When removing the transfer
tape, be careful not to lift any of the interior parts of the letters. Just go slow and if you see
any of those little bits pulling up, just pull it back down and then you might need
use the tip of a tool to make sure that it comes
off or stays or whatever onto your design.
Step 6, Mod Podge your vinyl
stencil on your wood sign. Using a paint brush, apply a coat of Matte
Mod Podge to your sign, right over your vinyl. You really only need to
put on the negative spaces, the places where your
paint is going to go. The Mod Podge helps prevent
the paint from leaking and bleeding under the vinyl. Now, you don't need to go too thick here but you also want to be
careful about going too thin. What you see me doing here is just right. Now, it's important, though, that when you apply your Mod Podge, make sure that you're
coating it in all directions. You want it to be going
into all of the cracks. And the the thing is is that
Mod Podge is transparent. So if it bleeds underneath
the vinyl stencil we won't see it.
So it's not a big deal. Now be sure to let this
layer of Mod Podge dry completely before you
move onto your next step. I let my Mod Podge dry for one hour and it was actually dry well before that. It really depends on how much you put on and also depends on the
conditions and your environment. You could also just let it dry overnight to be on the safe side. Step 7, paint your wood sign. After your Mod Podge has dried its time to begin painting. I like to use a paint brush, specifically a stencil
brush, to apply the paint. And I like to use the Pounce method. The Pounce method is where
you keep your paint brush straight up and down and
you dab it onto your surface in an up and down motion.
You don't brush it into cracks at all. This is a stencil technique and this one of the ways
that professional stencilers get really, really awesome
results, the Pounce method. I'll show you, I'm going
to hold the sign up so that you can it from the side. So you see how I'm just coming right down, straight onto it and I'm
just touching the surface and then just coming right back up.
It's just sort of bouncing with pressure, so it's pouncing. I don't know if it's actually, that's why it's called that. But that's how I think of it. It's bouncing with a little pressure so that the paint stays on there. And you just do that
all over your project. And it'll leave a little bit of a texture. So you can use a cosmetic sponge to very lightly dab at
it and smooth things out. Do not brush with he
cosmetic sponge, just dab. So you're pouncing with the sponge too. It just has a more uniform surface. Just make sure that you get your paint over all of your negative area. So all of your letters
and all of your images. And wait for the paint to dry before you move on to the next step. My paint dried in two hours.
So it didn't take very long. You are of course welcome to
let it sit longer if you'd like and you can add in an additional
layer on if necessary. Now, one layer will give it a kind of, kind of transparent, kind of aged look, which I really like, especially for a wood sign but if you want something more solid you could do two or even three coats. Just be sure to keep those coats light. It really depends on the
look that you prefer. Step 8, remove the vinyl stencil. After the paint has dried, slowly and carefully
remove your vinyl stencil. Removing the vinyl in
the opposite direction of the wood grain helps to avoid unwanted paint from lifting. Use a weeding tool to remove the vinyl from the inner part of the letters. I had no issues removing any of my vinyl until I got to the center of my letters and it was, the Mod
Podge had so well sealed that I, at times, kind of had to dig in and a couple of the corners, you know, there's like a divot where
I had to really dig in with my weeding tool.
Just keep that in mind. Now, I'm not a particularly good weeder. You might be much better at it than me but that was the only problem
I had at all with this project and honestly, now that the vinyl's off, I really can't even
see those little divots where I had to really work at it to get the centers out. Now there may be times when you lift paint when you remove your vinyl from the sign. If this happens, it's an easy fix depending on how much
of the paint was lifted. So you can use a straight pin and then dip it into the paint and patch up any spots that lifted when the vinyl was removed. So, in those spots where
I had those little divots, I just took my paint brush and put the tiniest little
bit of paint right there to cover up where I dug in my weeding too.
All right, so, where it is. It's finished. The stencil's off and look at those beautiful, sharp lines. It's just, it's a sight to behold. They're so crisp and clean and no capping. Ha ha, just kidding. (laughs) But seriously, they look fantastic and I love it and I love this technique. And we made another sign. This one we stained first so you can see the difference between the non-stained and the stained. Well, the sign came with some stain but a more vibrant stain. Step 9, seal your wood sign. And if you want you
can seal your wood sign with a spray of polyurethane. I sprayed mine with matte polyurethane because I wanted to retain old world, weathered look of this really quaint sign but you could use gloss
or satin if you wanted. The idea is that if you
use the acrylic sealer it will protect your surface and it'll last for many years to come.
Wasn't that amazing? I was so impressed with the
clean, sharp lines of the paint after I took the stencil off that I had to take a closeup picture. And the sign only took a few
hours from start to finish and I wasn't even working
on the sign the whole time. This was a fun project
with awesome results. Just be sure to use that Matte Mod Podge and be sure to use your Pounce
method with your paint brush. And just think of all the
signs you can make now. If you've got any questions at all about how to make or use
vinyl stencils on wood, I want to help. Leave your question below this video or ask over in our Cricut Crafters group at jennifermaker.com/cricutcrafters. There you will find a whole community of awesome crafters who are happy to share their advice and ideas with you. And don't forget to
enter my Cricut giveaway, going on right now.
You can enter for the chance to win your very own Cricut cutting machine. Get all the details over at jennifermaker.com/cricutgiveaway. And I believe that's it for today. Tomorrow I'll be back to
show you a really cool and fun paper craft that my
daughter is helping me design. Remember, I'm always open
to your project ideas. If you could tell me what you want to make I can show you how to make it. Until next time, this is Jennifer Maker reminding you to craft the life you love. (soft lighthearted music).