Travel Subway Art Sign (and how I came back from a nasty fight with spray paint)

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So if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you probably have heard me talk about A Mustard Seed Dream Vinyl right?  Well Tara, the owner, asked me to do a review of her custom vinyl.

I thought about what I wanted to do, and I thought it would be fun to create a subway art board of all the places I’d like to travel to with my family.  So my husband and I made a list of all the places we’d like to go someday and I sent her the list.  It was a LONG list.  And sweet Tara, she put it all together in a subway art arrangement in the dimensions I wanted.  And then she changed the text to the font I wanted as well!  She cut it into a stencil for me rather than vinyl letters (which I actually kind of regret now) and it was perfect.

To start this project, I cut a piece of plywood to about 32″x4 feet.  Then I stained it with Walnut wood stain.  I’ve been staining a lot of wood lately for various projects and my 3-year-old was helping me.  He was having a great time and did a great job!

To apply the vinyl, I laid it on top of my wood and Will helped me while I peeled off the backing carefully.  It took awhile because of all the letters with little insides (remember it was a stencil) but I finally did it.  And I could not have done it without Will’s help.  I flipped it over and pressed it on, using a credit card to really keep it down.  Then we carefully peeled off the other side.

The Craft Fail Part:

To paint it, I made the giant mistake of using white spray paint.  Maybe some of you out there have been successful with spray painting stencils but seriously, it looked terrible.  And since spray paint has this weird sticky ingredient, it made it all the more a nightmare.

What was the prob with the spray paint, you ask?  First off-it seemed to just disappear into the wood unless I really sprayed it good.  So it used a ton of paint.  Secondly it was an uneven coat.  And finally, it leaked through the vinyl and smudged the words horribly.  So I personally don’t recommend using spray paint.  I wish so much that I’d used acrylic craft paint.  Peeling the vinyl off was a hand-staining nightmare.  My fingers were sticky for hours.

So since the words came out all smudgy and ugly, I could have bailed and re-done the whole thing.  But I was not in the mood and fortunately I tend to like really rustic and weathered looking stuff.  So I went that route.  Here’s my new motto:

When in doubt, use the mouse sander.

Seriously, my sander has resurrected so many of my projects (which usually are wrecked due to spray paint.)  So I went to town on my sign with some 220 grit and made it all old looking.  And finished it with some spray gloss.  To hang it, I used one of those wire and eye-screw thingys like on my other sign.

I’m not gonna lie, it took awhile to get used to.  For the first several days I was kinda sad when I looked at it, always squinting to imagine what I really wanted it to look like.  But now I’m used to it and I really do like it.  I love where it is located in my living room, adding some vertical height.

But if I had to do it over again, I would either paint it with acrylic craft paint or just do the vinyl on the wood.  The vinyl on the wood would be a million times easier but I like the feeling of it actually being painted on.

When we get into a house, I want to put it in a place where I can start hanging pictures all around it of all the places we HAVE been on that list. You know, when we start actually living our lives.

Do you want to make something like this?  I recommend Tara from A Mustard Seed Dream–super easy to work with and she does a great job!