The past few days I have had gotten kind of bored looking for stuff to do...well...besides laundry, cleaning, and all that lame stuff. I decided that in my 'spare time' I was going to finish a craft I had started a while ago. I stumbled upon this idea on Pinterest a few months back and fell in love with it. I figured it would be so cute for my future house or even my future husbands 'man cave'. The original picture I found on Pinterest had some pastel colors on the wood, others had glitter on the heads, etc. I decided that to make them a little more manly I would stain the wood a dark color and do just a plain black head. Here is how my project turned out..
Pretty adorable if you ask me (; Want to make one of your own?
Here is step by step instructions of how I made mine!
I first went online and searched on Google for "deer outline" "deer head" "deer antlers" etc. The specific site that I found my two images was on freepick.com! They were free downloadable vector files that I just clicked on and downloaded. The images I used for mine were...
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I got my pallet from a friend of mine, but I know you can usually get a free one at some liquor stores, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. I will explain how I put the images from online to the boards a little bit down the line. Anyways, here is what my pallet looked like at the start...
Oh and here is the cute boy helping me rip it apart cause I am so weak. Lol.
I just had to throw a photo of my adorable boyfriend in here somewhere. He was such a help making these and giving me ideas of what would work best for them. I am glad he puts up with me and all of my weird projects.(if he is reading..) You are a doll Brayd!
We used a hammer and a crow bar to (gently) pull the top pieces of wood off. If you do it too rough the wooden piece may split down the middle, which gives you major slivers. Once I pulled all of them off I chose the best pieces, in my opinion. I kept 2-3 additional boards in case one broke and for the backings of the sign.
I took many pieces of various grit sand papers and sanded them down until they were all the same color and smooth.
Brayden used a hand saw and a table saw to cut them in half. I used the nail marks in the middle as a guide of where to cut in half. After I cut down the middle of the boards I sanded those edges down. That made them not sharp and it also made it so you couldn't see any marks from the screws that were used in the middle. Once I placed out what 5 pieces of the boards I was wanting for each side I took 2 more of them for the back (the uglier ones haha). I lined them up vertically placing the 5 boards on the top making sure they lined up correctly. I used black 3/4 inch screws to attach them to the boards on the back. The ratio I did was #1-2 screws, #2-1 screws, #3-2 screws, #4-1 screws, #5-2 screws, just to give it a little more detail. (See three pictures below). I also did it that way so the board in the middle that was a little bigger than the rest ended up with 2 screws and is a little more secure. The reason I put the two back pieces on was not only to hold the boards together, it allows for the hole thing to hang evenly off of the wall.
I than took a paint brush and a rag to wipe some stain over the top to give it a little bit of rustic look. The stain that I used is from the brand MINWAX the color is #203 - Early American. The next step is printing off your pictures. I sent my images in as 11x14 photo prints to my local print shop, proditialphotos.com.
Pro Digital Photos is the cutest print shop ever! I highly suggest you go checkout their website if you haven't already! You will fall in love. Once I got my prints I cut them out leaving no trim/extra along the outer edges.
I taped them to my boards and traced the images very lightly with a pencil. (See below)
Once I traced the images I than laid down a sheet and took my can of black paint and painted inside the pencil lines. The brand of paint I used was Sherwin Williams, color Black Onyx - Matte. I didn't go and buy this specific brand of black paint, this is an old can we had lying around the house from a previous project. I let that dry for about an hour or so. I than went and took a piece of a lighter grit sand paper and lightly sanded over the black paint. This gave them kind of a roughed up / rustic look. Once I felt like they were sanded to my satisfaction, I put a light coat of matte MINEWAX polyurethane over the top just to kind of seal the look.
After that is all dried, you are done!
Enjoy, xoxo.
