The Cozy Coffin: Superhero Girl's Camp: Pallet Signs

We wanted to come up with a way to designate what campsite each of our wards would be assigned and incorporate our awesome Value Shields, you can download them from a previous post.

We decided to do Pallet Signs

We used Cedar Wood 1x6 6ft planks and Home Depot was nice enough to cut them for us. To make the planks here is what you will need for one Pallet sign:

4 1x6 6 ft cedar planks (we did cedar because it was cheap $1.56 on sale)

Box of 1 1/4 inch screws

Milk paint (I got mine from hobby lobby using a coupon)

Sponge brush

paint brushes with slanted or straight edge

Parchment paper (for tracing)

craft paint

pencil

To make the pallet as I mentioned I had Home Depot cut the wood in half for us so we had 8 pieces of wood (we wanted the pallets to be 3x3 ft) I took the 6 pieces of wood and lined them up on top of each other against a straight edge on my garage floor. I then took the other two pieces of wood and placed them vertically near the edge of each side, they were a little long, so I did have to use my jigsaw to "nip" the ends off.( make sure you have the best side of the wood facing down, so it is the top piece) I took the screws and with a drill, drilled the screws into the wood, I used 4 screws per plank on each side. Make sure to keep the pieces tight, they will move on you.

Next up was applying the Milk Paint, I set the Pallet on 2 buckets and put an old tablecloth underneath, I then got several sponge brushes (the wood tears them up) and started applying it in a back and forth motion, be sure to get the sides as well. I didn't paint all the wood, I just used a dry brush technique, I still wanted to see some of the wood coming through.

After it was dry, I then took the pallet into my house (air conditioning!) and placed it on my kitchen table (with another old tablecloth underneath) For the flags we were making (I'll share that next) we had to trace the designs, so I already had the stencils needed to trace the image onto the pallet. I used the corrugated signs we had made for Camp Kickoff for tracing the stencils.

To make the stencils I put tracing paper (my husband is an architect and has special paper they use) but you can use parchment paper as well, over the image needing to be traced. Now because these are 3 ft by 3ft the image needs to be very large. You may have to go to office depot or Costco and have your image printed in large format if you don't have signs made already. Because my image has a shadow in it, I traced just the white portions and then I traced the outline of the shadow. So in the end I had layers, this is important for making the flags as well.

I first traced the circle onto the pallet making sure it was centered, to make the circle I used my cotton candy pan (had to get creative) and then for the inside circle I used a big embroidery hoop I was using as a wreath. Just look around your house, the circles need to big enough to fit your image. I then painted the area between the two circles and let it dry. (this is where a good paint brush comes in handy to get sharp edges)

Next I took my shadow stencils first and placed them within the circle, once I had them in the right places I took my pencil and traced around them. I then took the craft paint color I needed for the pallet and filled in around the tracing. (I did the opposite on the key, it works better doing the shadow first)

After the paint had dried I then placed the white portion of the stencil where it needed to go (lined up correctly, I had to refer to the original a lot!) and traced it. I then took my black craft paint and filled in the space. I didn't fill in the white because I like the look of the milk paint, keeping it rustic.

I then printed off letters from the font Badaboom to add the wards names, I just cut the letters out I needed and traced them onto the pallet and then filled them in with black craft paint. Sorry it's upside down lol! I was taking a quick picture.