Creating a hanging sign out of mdf board - HOME

Even though there are plenty of wooden signs you can buy in the shops, I think that it is always nice to create your own. It is not as hard as you may think, even though of course it is still quite time-consuming. I decided to start with a simple diamond-shaped design.

Start by drawing and cutting out a diamond shape on paper.

Then trace the shape on mdf board four times and cut it our carefully using a jigsaw.

The edges are a bit rough, but smooth them over with your sander and you have nice identical (or almost identical) diamond shapes.

I then painted the shapes in Annie Sloan Old Ochre and waxed using clear wax.

When you are happy with them, mark and drill a hole where you want the string to go. In this project I wanted the sign to hang down in a string. One diamond in front of each other hanging vertically. To achieve this you must drill 2 holes on three shapes (top and bottom) and 1 hole on one shape (top). The shape with one hole on top will be your LAST letter so in this case – E (for HOME).

Now comes the fun part, doing the lettering on the signs. All you need to do is print out a lettering to the font and size you want.

and cut the letters out. Match your letters to the correct shapes.

Use tracing paper and place it between the surface of the heart and your font. Trace the outside line of the letter using a pencil or pen. Then remove the paper and the tracing paper and the letter should be visible on the surface. Don’t worry if your letter is a little wonky and not straight, it can be all fixed when you go over with the paint.

Using a fine brush and some acrylic paint, trace over the outside line and then fill out the rest of the letter.

Think of this as painting your nails, two thin coats are better than one thick coat and if you made any slight mistakes with first coat, you can go over nicely when you do your second coat.

Repeat this on the rest of your letters and let it dry. Put as many thin coats as you wish.

I decided to use some dark wax on this project as I thought these signs looked a little bright and new.. I really wanted to have a bit of a rustic look. so tried it on one letter and was pretty pleased with the result.

So I decided to put a couple of layers of the dark wax.

All you do, is rub some dark wax with a cloth and then buff away (same as with clear wax).

You could clearly see the difference. This is of course totally up to you, as I think both ways looked really nice.

Then cut out small pieces of twine at tie, feed them through the holes and tie around to fasten the shapes together. And this is how the finished sign turned out to look.