DIY Wooden Verse Sign Tutorial

When we started decorating the nursery for Mason, we knew we wanted to hang a verse over his crib.  Bradley cut out the wood, making it look sort of rustic, painted it white, and hung it up before Mason was born in April.  Until last Friday, it hung on the wall just like that.

I'm glad, though, because the original verse I had chosen wouldn't have been as fitting as the one that is now there.

Here's a little of the process:

We measured above the crib and then Bradley figured out how long each piece of wood should be to give it the pallet-like look that we wanted.  It's a bit staggered, on purpose, and I like it this way.  You could easily make all the pieces the same size; be creative.

A calculator is always handy when coming up with exact measurements!

We used a furring strip to make this, which is less expensive than other types of lumber.  One piece runs a little less than $1.50.  For our project, we only needed one strip.  He measured with a straight edge to get the exact cuts.

He's using a miter saw in this picture, but you don't need to, as there are no angled cuts.  Just cut right on your marks.

After all the cuts were made, he laid out the pieces to match his diagram, just to make sure it looked as good as his picture.  It did!

Back to the garage he went, and used more pieces of the furring strip {or you could use 1/4-inch plywood} to attach all the pieces together.  We wanted it to stand out a little bit from the wall, so this gave it some dimension.

No pictures of this, but he then painted it white.

My job was to put the verse on; this is probably why it sat unfinished for months!  I do not own a Silhouette machine, or a Cricut, so I knew I would either be free-handing the verse or printing it out on the computer and making some sort of stencil.

My free hand is not great, so I used Wordpad to create the words, Lucida Handwriting is the font, and just made it as large as I thought I would need to fill in the space.  I laid out the words to fit.

I ended up cutting out around the letters and used them as a stencil, tracing with a pencil.  I filled in the letters with a black Sharpie.

I've written a little bit about our journey finding out that Mason has Down Syndrome. {You can read my 31 Days of a Truth Driven Heart where I shared more of how God has worked in my heart through this}.  Even though he was born with this chromosomal disorder, he is still wonderfully made by God.  This was ordained from the beginning of time, and we trust that God's ways are perfect, good, and for His glory.  So, we are rejoicing in our sweet little boy who is such a delight to our family!  We hope that one day he will learn to praise God for being fearfully and wonderfully made.

Linking to: