Making Signs with your Cricut Expression

Hello!  Today I have a sign I made for our church library.  Since our church library shares the same space as our church office,our librarian asked me to come up with something to put outside our church office to  let our congregation know we have a library.  I played around with several ideas.   At first I was just going to print something on the computer and put it in a picture frame, but the size of the wall wasn't right for that.  Then I was going to just cut letters out of vinyl using my Cricut and adhere that directly to the wall but I wasn't sure about that one either.  I was worried about how long the letters would actually stick to the wall and if there would be any damage to the paint.  Then, I just kept seeing these quote signs in all the stores and thought, 'I could do that!'.  So first I asked my handy dandy husband to cut me a piece of wood and bevel the edges.  I know, that's the real hard part, especially if you don't have a handy dandy husband and all the tools to go with it!  But I'm lucky that way.  Then I stained the whole piece of wood to match the stain of the woodwork at church.  Then I used a ruler and penciled in a line about an inch from the beveled edge.  I painted on an 'Antique White' acrylic paint, let that dry and using a feather brush, very lightly painted on some darker brown to give it more interest.  Then I painted a dark black line along the entire sign where the stain and paint met.  

Now, here's where the Cricut comes in handy.  I cut out my letters using two different fonts.  And unlike stencils, where you are limited to the size of the letters of the stencils, I could size my letters EXACTLY to the size I needed.  Then, I could place my letters directly on my sign so I could play around with them and see where I wanted the letters to go (another thing you can't do with stencils).  After I positioned my letters where I thought they looked best, I hand drew around each one with a pencil then I removed the letters and filled in around the pencil lines with paint.  If you don't want to paint the letters, you could also just use the Cricut Vinyl and adhere the letters directly to the board.  But I wanted the 'hand-made look', so I chose to paint them on.

Here's the finished sign: 

And here is a close up so you can see the painting better.  I also outlined all the letters with a fine brush in black.

Now I realize most of you don't need to make a sign for a public place like I did, but I thought you'd enjoy seeing this if you wanted to make a sign for your home using a favorite quote or Bible Verse. 

Have a great day! Amy