Spoonful of Sugar

My inspiration for this sign was an image posted by The Graphics Fairy.  Hers was a black and white and I wanted mine to be a bit lighter so I used gray.  I originally was going to make this a children's bookstore sign, but the theme took me in a different direction so I just went with it, plus I love to host and attend whimsical tea parties myself.
The board for this sign started out as a broken table I purchased sight unseen from an online auction.  They did list the table as "as is,"  but they didn't explain what the as is was.  The legs were broken and one of the top pieces was cracked and busted.  I used the table top for another project I will show you next week, but for the broken half of the table I knew immediately I wanted to paint a sign on it.  My husband sheared the bad part off and made it even for me and painted it with a satin white paint I had on hand.

 I made a reverse copy of the image from The Graphics Fairy and reduced it so it would fit on my board with my artist's projector.  I projected the image onto the board and lightly traced the image with pencil.  All  I had to work with for gray paint was some old latex paint  that was nearly gone.  I wanted to save myself a trip to the craft store to save time.  Also I am a firm believer of using what you have on hand.  The latex paint worked just fine.

 As always, I map out my lettering ahead of time on paper.  This may sound like extra work, but it saves so much time and re-doing, it is worth it.  I figured out the spacing of the letters and then I could easily figure out the exact placement on the piece.

 Here I used three different stencils to do the lettering.  After it was all done, I thought it was a little too pristine for my taste so I shabbied it up a little bit.  Here is the finished product.