Supplies:
- Printer. I have a laser printer, but an ink jet printer will also work
- Acrylic cut down to your needed size. I purchased my acrylic from Lows, and they even cut it down to size for me for free.
- Paint and paint brush
- Stand for your sign. I am using an easel that I spray painted rose gold. You could also glue some Jenga blocks on both sides of your acrylic when you are finished with it to hold it. Depending on your acrylic will depend how many blocks or how thick of wood you will need for this.
- Wood board for your background. I glued two floorboards together to make my wood back board. You could also buy a background already made.
- Gloweforge or my shop or in my Etsy shop
The first step was to make my background. I had used a saw to cut down some floorboards I had purchased awhile ago. I then applied some gorilla glue into the seams of my floorboards and connected them together. I placed some heavy items on top of the floorboards and let it dry. I made my sign about 24 inches wide and 16 inches tall. If you need a larger background, then you can cut and glue more floorboards together. You could also purchase a background already ready to go.
Next, I designed and cut out my tee, birds, hearts, names, and dates with my Glowforge. You can find my design in my shop or my Etsy shop. I choose to cut my pieces out of wood to give it more dimension. You could also cut all these shapes and pieces out of vinyl, leather, fabric, cardstock, and much more. The Cricut machines can also be used to cut thin pieces of wood, as long as your design is not to small or detailed. So, the names and date would be to small and detailed, but the hearts should be okay depending on how large you make your pieces. The best results for cutting wood with a Cricut is on a Cricut Maker with the knife blade and purple strong grip mat, with the wood taped down onto the mat to help hold it in place.
I decided to add some small and large hearts as well as two cute little birds in the tree. You can decide to use the entire design or just pieces of it. If you need to make more hearts, then just select the hearts, and hit duplicate. The font I used for the names is called hello honey. For the date I used the font Arial.
I made my larger hearts about 1 inch, but I would recommend making yours just a little larger so people have a little more room to write their name. Make sure everything is sized to your liking before you begin cutting anything. My background may be a different size than yours, and you may need to add or take away some hearts depending on how many guests you will have. I have 95 large hearts. I have one large heart per guest that will be attending my wedding.
If you cut all your pieces out of wood like I did, then you will need to paint or spray paint or even stain everything. Let them dry and glue them to your background. I used gorilla glue to glue down my pieces to insure they were on my background well. If you cut pieces out of vinyl, then you will need to weed out all the pieces you do not want. Then use transfer tape to transfer all your pieces to your background. If you are using cardstock, then you can glue your cardstock pieces directly to your wood background. You could even use leather or a fabric to make all or a mixture of the different pieces. Using different materials could also be fun.
I also used my wood cutout as a template to help me keep my letters spaced when gluing them to my board. I placed my template when I wanted it, then applied some glue to the back of my letters and numbers with a toothpick. I then placed them accordingly inside the template. When I was finished placing my letters and numbers I carefully used a toothpick to push any letters or numbers that might have gotten stuck in the template through as I slowly pulled my template up.
Now that the sign is done, lets move onto the little sign to tell people to sign a heart. I used Avery printable sticker paper, glossy clear for ink jet and laser printers, and put my design in a word document. You could also do a print then cut with your Cricut machine, but I wanted to use the most out of my Avery sticker paper. So, I just printed it directly from a word document. I also did not need my Cricut to make a precise cut around my design. This was done with a laser printer, but you can also use an ink jet printer. I turned my text and image all into an image (print then cut in Cricut Design Space) then copied it into my word document. There are several different ways you can do this. The Avery sticker paper also had direction on the packaging to walk you through how to print on their paper. Make sure you are printing on the shiny sticker side. You can print a small letter on normal computer paper to determine how your printer will feed and print to insure you place your Avery sticker paper in correctly. Once my printer printed my design onto my Avery sticker paper, I used my scissors to cut roughly around my design.
Next, I applied my design directly to the front of my clear acrylic, that I had Lows cut down to size for me for free. I was a bit excited to apply my sticker, that I did not go slowly or measure and have a small air pocket in my sticker. It became less noticeable in my next step though.
With the clear acrylic, I thought my text was a bit difficult to read. My light pink flowers where also difficult to see. So, I decided to paint the back of my clear acrylic a light pink. This really helped those pink flowers stand out, and you can now read the words. I just used a paint brush and BEHR flat matte paint for this. You may need to apply two coats especially if you are using a lighter color paint. I decided to do a more messy paint stroke style. You could also paint the entire background if you wish. I then just left it aside to dry.
I cut and painted a few extra hearts to test some different markers and pens. I liked the gold color against the light pink hearts, but the silver color against the burgundy paint. I knew not all of my guest would use the correct pen for the specific color heart. So, I decided to stick with just a black pen for everything. I found these thin tipped black sharpie markers worked really well. They did bleed some if the hearts where not painted.
I am very happy with how this piece turned out. I also have a small guest book for my guest if they would like to write personal notes to us as well.
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