Painted Chevron Sign

Subtitle: My first Silhouette {cutting machine} project!!!

After my amazing hunk of a hubby bought me a Silhouette cutting machine for my birthday, I was so excited I could pee my pants.  In fact, I think I may have done just that.  Just a little.  Don't judge.  I could not wait to jump right in and get started cutting some vinyl!  That enthusiasm, of course, led to the poor Silhouette sitting lonely on my craft shelf for almost 3 months.

However!  Here we are...with my first Silhouette project completed and hanging on the wall!  

This vintage chevron sign tutorial here at The Handmade Home was my inspiration for this first project.  The Handmade Home is my total blog crush.  Ashley's home is incredibly creative, handmade, artistic, and personal.  I often dream at night of packing up the kids, knocking on her door, and asking if we can move in.  

That weird stalkiness aside, on to the sign...

I decided to use this sign to display a list of the read aloud books that my son, Merrick, and I have read together.  Merrick is 5 years old and we just started homeschooling (kindergarten) a few weeks ago.  I will cherish the memories of reading these books together, snuggled up together on his bed, for a long, long time.

I made my sign just like Ashley's tutorial with a few exceptions.  The size of my sign is a little different, so I had to change up the dimensions a bit.  For the white paint, I used my leftover paint from my cubby storage project (which is still incomplete by the way...I think I'll be in diapers before that stinkin' project is finished!).  The white, Magnolia Blossom, is my new favorite white.

It took me at least one episode of Friday Night Lights to get through just taping the sign.   It took me a couple of tries before I figured out exactly where the tape should go.  I'm kinda brilliant like that.

These are the two greens I used.  I really like how one is a warm yellow green and the other is very cool.  As always, I used the Behr paint from Home Depot.  I love that it has the primer included in the paint.  

I tried wiping a bit of the paint off as mentioned in the original tutorial but didn't have much luck with that.  Instead, I used a dry brush and painted a little of the coordinating color here and there to give it a messy look.

Now that I'm looking at it again, I wish I would have painted a little green (using the same dry brush method) on the white as well.

Using the Silhouette was pretty simple once I figured it out (which, as I mentioned above, only took 3 months...once again, brilliant).  The only difficult thing was sticking the getting the letters to stay on straight.  I think, however, that there is a transfer paper that you can buy that can solve this problem.  Feel free to clue me in if you're in the know here.  

I couldn't wait to show my hubby how my first Silhouette project turned out.  He looked at it, as he always does, for a few seconds trying to figure out what to say.  "Sooooo....this is what it does, huh?" he said.  "Yes!  It just cuts all my letters and I slap it down on the board.   Do you like it?" I asked, naturally trying to trap him into giving me a definite answer.  "Yeah," he says, unconvincingly, "but, why wouldn't you just buy vinyl letters?"  Oh my gosh.  I am speechless for one full minute.  Did we just spend a couple hundred dollars on a confusing machine when I could have just spend $3.99 at Hobby Lobby on a few packs of vinyl letters?  Then, thinking quickly, I replied, "Because with this, I can make the letters any size and in any font."  Yes, I reassure myself, that is definitely worth a couple hundred bucks.  

OK.  I am still in love with my Silhouette.  I am probably going to make about 10 more signs in the next month alone.  But, I have got to figure out how to use it to it's full capacity so that the vinyl letter aisle at Hobby Lobby isn't mocking me every time I pass by.  If you have any resources to this effect, feel free to drop me a line.  :)