Beginner Woodworking: Making a Wall Plaque

1. Intro- Making a Wall Plaque: Hello, welcome to beginner woodworking class number for making a wall plaque. I'm SoCal would gal and I am thrilled to finally be back in the shop building and creating. Now if you haven't already, please do take some time to watch the prior three classes that setting up your Which up, building a simple table and making your wind projects amazing, threw paint and stain. These classes are really meant to build on each other. And this class will utilize many of the techniques and the knowledge that you've obtained from watching the prior classes. In today's class, we're going to cover types of wall plaques. Why I love while blacks, types of materials to use measurements, how to design the front would prep staining or painting would base a fixing your design and painting it, sealing your design, and finally hanging your wall plaque. This class is for anyone interested in making their own wooden wall plaque. No prior experience is required, but some basic tools are necessary. Hammer, saw, sander, eye, ear, lung protection, gloves, and a paintbrush. Now, depending on your design preferences, you might also need either a printer, a paper crafting machine, like a cricket or stencils. Let's get started. 2. Types of Wall Plaques: Okay, let's talk about wall plaques. What are they? Well, that depends. A wall plaque can communicate, need to know information or directions. It can decorate a space. It can reveal some personality and depending on its size, can completely transform a space. You can display them outside or inside, in your shop or in your laundry room. It can welcome guests to your guest bedroom, inspire you in your office or decorate for the holidays. 3. Why I Love Wall Plaques: Okay, by now it should be no surprise. I love wall plaques. Not only are they incredibly versatile, they make unique and thoughtful gifts to give to others. This one next to my coffee station is informative and fun. It details different types of coffee mixtures while also decorating the space. This one I made as a wedding gift for a friend. This one went up over the laundry room sink and not only gives some eye candy to the space, it also has these hangers for brushes at the bottom. This plaque isn't our guest bedroom and lets our guests know the Wi-Fi name and password. It's insanely useful. This one was gifted to a friend for her sentence bedroom. Okay. If you're not convinced yet that you need to make a wall plaque stat, then of course you're convinced. Let's get to it. 4. Materials You'll Need: To make your wooden wall plaque, you most definitely are going to need wait for it. Would what type of wood is up to you? You can do it with one solid piece of wood. That'll be a slab. Or you can go from more of a rustic look with multiple planks of wood attached together with a back brace. Sir choice, I tend to like the look of multiple planks and it also uses up a bunch of scrap wood I have sitting around. But it also is slightly harder to make your design work smoothly with the gaps in between the planks. But it's certainly nothing to scare you off. You're going to need a saw, either a hand saw or a miter saw to cut your plaque to the size that you need. Sander or sandpaper to prep the wood, stain or paint for the wood base and eventual design. Brushes for the paint in staying a hammer and nails and polyurethane to protect your finished project. Now as far as the design goes, you have options here as well, depending on your skill level and what's available to you. I have a cricket, it's a paper crafting machine, and I love it and use it for many, many of my wall plaques. But there's no doubt that using it takes extreme patients and quite a bit of fuzziness. You have excellent lettering capabilities and can free hand it. I cannot. Then that would by far be the quickest and easiest route. The next easiest requires that you have a printer. You can make your design in Microsoft Word or another editing program, print it off, and then tape it to your plaque. You'll then emboss the design by drawing over all the letters with the pen. You're gonna press hard into the wood and it'll leave an outline of all of the letters where you're going to eventually paint. You can also use tracing paper in much the same way. You'll draw over your design with a pen. They've tracing paper sandwich between your print off and the wooden plaque. If you have any stencils laying around, feel free to use those. I will be demonstrating all of these techniques for you in the following videos. So don't worry too much about this right now. 5. Measurements: Before you can do anything, you're going to need to figure out where your wall plaque is going to go and what size it should be. For our example today, I want to make a wall plaque for our guest bathroom. I think it would look nice over the toilet instead of the framed print that we have there at present. So first things first, I'm going to measure my space and decide how much real estate I want to take up with my wall plaque. Now that I know what space I have to work with, I'm gonna go ahead and draw out my design on paper, making note of the measurements. 6. Designing Your Wall Plaque: Okay guys, this is the fun part. What do you want to say? You can scroll on line for inspiration, go to Pinterest or your favorite home blog. Decide what else will go on there. Is it just going to be text or will it have hooks or other adornments on it? What are you using it for? Is it informational, decorative, or functional? Personally, I'm a little cheeky and I also happen to have strong feelings about putting the lid down. So I came up with this. This lid was made for close. Since I know the dimensions of my woodblock, I'm gonna go ahead and draw a rectangle in my Word program or other editing program, roughly the size of my plaque, then I'm going to mess around with the lettering until I like it. If I do this in cricket, I'll use the template function and then basic Canvas. Then I'm gonna resize it to my dimensions and colored, uh, would color just for aesthetics. Once my lettering is spaced in size to how I want it, I'll either print it from my Word program for tracing or I'll cut it out with my cricket for use either as a stencil or as a vinyl to stick on top of the plaque. 7. Prepping Your Wood: Okay, now that you've made your design, you know your dimensions, and you know where it's going to go. It's finally time to smell some sawdust. Now, sadly, the building part of today's class is short, but will make up for it in the next lesson, I promise. Are you going to go the slab plaque route, then find a piece of wood half-inch thick or thicker, and cut it to size. If you've watched the previous lessons, then you'll know exactly what to do here. But I'll go ahead and give you a quick overview. Measure your width and your length. Market on the wood with a right angle. Bring it up to your soul with the blade to the outside of your line and make a clean cut. And now do the other cat. If you're gonna do it Planck style, grab a few pieces of scrap wood and cut them all to size or staggered their lengths. It's up to you. Do this the same way as before. You'll need to attach the planks together and I find the easiest way to do that is with a back brace. This is also where you'll attach your hanger later on. So measured the width of your Planck's together. Two pieces of wood that will overlap all the planks perpendicularly but not extend past the sides. Place your planes the way you want them. If staggered and glue your two pieces of wood to the backs of the planks or screw them in ensuring that the screw doesn't go through the front of the plaque. You can also do this super easily with a brad nail or if you happen to own one. Now seems your plaque until it's nice and smooth. I suggest starting with 60 to 80 grit and then moving on up to 120 grit. 8. Staining or Painting Your Wood Base: For today's lesson, I'll just decide between either a painted background or a stained one. If you've cut out of vinyl overlay, it won't stick super well to the oiling is abstained. So you might consider paint instead. If you're using a stencil or tracing, paint should go over painters staying just fine so long as it's a color that'll show up over whatever background color you choose. Now do keep in mind that if you're tracing, if it's black tracing paper, it's not going to show up over a dark background super well. And it also might be a little difficult to see and boss lettering on a darker background. Here's a few options demonstrated for you. For a stain base, dip your cloth into your stain while wearing gloves and wipe a nice even coverage over all your boards. Let it set for a minute or so and then wipe off the excess. You can add more layers of stain for a deeper color if you like, for a painted base, simply dip your paintbrush into your paint and brush onto your boards, being careful to wipe up an address. I think I'll do a watered-down yellow paint, so it looks a little bit aged. I'll just add a little bit of water to my yellow paint and mix it up and then brush it onto the boards until I've achieved a color that I like. 9. Affixing Your Design and Painting: Okay. After your wood-based has dried good and well for staying, Give it a day for paint depending on how thickly you've painted it, a few hours might do. Then you're ready to a fixed your design to the front and paint it. Now if you've cut out a design as a stencil and cricket, This can be tricky, especially if it's super wordy. Weed out all of the letters so that you're left with just the negative of the letters. You'll set the design down and smooth it onto the boards, scraping the top to ensure its well in heared paint can very easily get up under the stencil and box your designs so patients and vigilance is highly recommended. Then go in with a paint brush and paint over your lettering and design. Or you can dip and Makeup sponge in your paints and dab it on top of your letters. Removed this tensile while the paint is still wet or you will risk this tensile pulling up the paint with it, let it dry. If you've cut out a vinyl overlaying cricket, then wheat out everything but the letters, the opposite of what you did before. Then put transfer paper on top and make sure to pick up all parts of the design and lettering. Now fixed it onto your wood the way that you want it and smooth it down really, really well so that all the letters stick to the wood. And in very, very carefully pull up the transfer paper, making sure that all the letters remain on the wood. If you've printed your design, tape it to the top of your plaque where you want it to be. Take a pen and trace over all of the letters, pressing hard into the wood. If you're using a soft wood like pine, it really shouldn't take that much effort. This method is the same. If you're using tracing paper, you'll just need less pressure and you're tracing. Placed the tracing paper between your printout and the wood and go over all of the letters. Afterwards, take a fine paintbrush and fill in all of the letters that are now embossed or traced onto your wood. If you have stencils, you know what to do. And if you are an awesome artists with a steady hand than freestyle letter this baby and make it amazing. 10. Sealing Your Design: Okay, by now, you should be looking at a custom-designed unique to you wooden wall plaque. You're almost final step is to protect your work of art. There are a variety of different protective coatings. You can use polyurethane varnish wax for my wall plaque today, I'm just going to use polyurethane. Once your paint is fully dried, Dipa sponge brush into the polyurethane and lightly brushed the top of your design covering all of the front-facing would alter two layers of polyurethane drying in between each. Now let this dry for a few hours or whatever your specific canned describes. 11. Hanging Your Wall Plaque: Your very last step is to attach something onto your wall plaque to hang out with. My usual method of choice are salty painters. They're fairly easy to use and they're pretty cheap. You'll need a hammer and the small nails that the hanger kit comes with. You can also do wire or a hanging loop. Just read the directions on the package. First, measure your placement of the hangers so you know where to put the nails in your wall. The measurement will be from one center of one saw tooth to the center of the other sawtooth. I find this to be a little bit finicky, but with proper planning and measuring, it shouldn't be too bad. If you're plaque is heavy enlarge, you might consider hanging at Office dad or an anchor rather than just dry wall. You're going to use a stud finder and mark it on the wall and place your hanger accordingly in order to utilize that said, now if it's lightweight like mine, than just take note of how many inches are between your cell tooth hangers. Find the center of your wall, make a mark, then measure out half the distance between the hangers on either side of that mark. Hammer a nail, and each spot. If you have just one center sawtooth hanger than just nail that right into the center of the wall. Now gently lower your plaque over the nail. Careful not to scratch your wall paint. Stand back and admire your handiwork. 12. Final Thoughts: We got a wall plaque in that. Who's going to walk like I gotta while track ball plaque, align, need it. Oh my goodness way to go. Now you know how to make your very own wall plaque. I really hope that this inspires you to make one for friends or pimp out your home with handmade details that really speak to your personal style. Now this also sets you up very nicely for our next class, which is small, handmade gifts to make for family and friends for Christmas. I'm so excited about this class. You guys. I encourage you to continue building up your shop, gather wood, use tools, whatever you can off of Craigslist, better prices, pin inspiration photos to your Pinterest page with pictures that inspire you for future projects. And most importantly, please, please, please post a picture of your finished wooden wall plaque onto the project page here. I can't wait to see what you create. Now. Let's go make some more sawdust.