How to Make a Rustic Wooden Sign, No Pallet Wood Needed!

No old wood or pallets are needed to make this rustic wooden sign.  Don’t have a wedding to make it for?  The same technique can be used to make any sign for a mantel or wall decor!

One of the last projects we were cramming to finish for my son’s wedding was a welcome sign.  My son’s fiancée sent me a few ideas of how she wanted it to look, and after making two signs for my niece and one for my oldest son’s wedding, I feel like I have this wedding sign making thing all figured out!

For the other signs I designed stencils (available HERE), but my daughter-in-law wanted more of a handwritten style font, so here’s how I did it.  Remember, you don’t have to make a large sign or a wedding sign.  You can make any size or style and add the text you’d like.  That’s the beauty of it.

How to Design a Rustic Wooden Sign

• Choose fonts for your sign.  I used Parisianne for welcome, and Geo Sans Light for the rest.
• Use Picmonkey to design the layout for the sign.  It’s a free program with lots of free fonts to choose from.  Here’s the one I designed for them.

How to Make a rustic wood sign:

Supplies Used:

Poplar plywood

Wood lath

Wood stain

Staple gun

Pen

White graphite paper

Oil based white paint marker

• Save the image to a flash drive and have an engineering print made at a copy shop in the size you want your sign to be.  I had mine printed at Staples for under $4.
• Buy a piece of lauan or poplar plywood and have it cut to size at a home improvement store.  I bought a 2′ x 4′ sheet.
• Stain or paint the edges of the wood.  I stained mine.
• Purchase wood lath and cut it to your desired length.
• Paint or stain the lath.
• Place the graphite paper under the printout and use a pen to trace over the lines.
• Use the paint marker to trace over those lines.
• Fill in the traced lines where needed.

To connect the wood lath to the plywood, we used the staple gun on the back side.  Much easier than the wood gun!  Just make sure to add several staples in each lath strip.

Use the same technique to add the text with the graphite paper as shown HERE on a smaller sign I made for their wedding.

Then just fill in the outlined words to darken it up and you’re done.

I wanted to add some flowers onto the sign, but they preferred it without.  I just stood it on an easel near the entrance on the Illuminated Crate Display.

Vaya con Dios,