🤯 Cricut Reversible Porch Sign UNDER $20! 🤯

Hello everyone and welcome back to our 13 days of falloween. I hope you are excited for what we have in store for you today and that is our reversible vertical porch sign. Now today we're going to get kind of like a two-in-one craft where you all are going to get a halloween craft and a fall craft. So stick around to learn exactly how we are going to do this with our Cricut. Before we get started on our porch sign one thing I do want to make sure that you all know we are going to be doing a frameless porch sign so it's going to look like it has a frame but it's not going to have a frame and it's going to be absolutely beautiful by the end. But our supplies it looks like there's a lot on this table and there is. Obviously we are starting out with our wood plank. Now this one we just got from Hobby Lobby and you can pick these up at any local home improvement store or craft store either one and you really can get whatever size you want for this. We just picked this one up at Hobby Lobby because it was simple and easy. Because we are working with a large area we are also going to need a 12 by 24 light grip cutting mat. Now we are going to be painting this sign today and we are going to be using star craft chalk paint. On the other side which I will show you guys in a minute I've already painted one side black and so this side I'm going to be using linen white but we are going to be using chalk paint. We're also going to use painter's tape this is just the frog brand painter's tape any painter's tape will work. We are going to be using a straight edge for measure measuring for our frameless effect as well as a pencil to mark that off. Because we are painting we are going to need a paintbrush. After we have finished painting we are going to be staining the edges of our sign and I will go ahead and flip this over for you so you can see what I mean. So I have just taped this off and what I'm going to be doing is we're going to be coming in here this is our favorite favorite wood stain it is the early American. I mean we're just going to be coming in here and staining the edges of this so that it gives it the faux frame look. When it comes to staining you are going to need some gloves and we've just got an old t-shirt or an old rag that you've cut up and we're going to be staining those edges with that. Once we have painted our sign we are going to be using HTV to apply our design to our sign so you will need lots of different colors of HTV depending on what design you want. These are the colors that we are going to be using today. You are also going to need a sanding block and that's just to give this sign a good light sand all over and finally you are going to need florals. Now this is something that is not absolutely required for your sign we think that it would give it a very nice touch. Now that we have gone over all of our supplies we are going to actually start with preparing our sign before we jump into the design space portion and the reason we're doing this is because you need to have your sign painted and let it fully dry before we move on to any other step. So as you can see I've already painted one side of this sign. This is the going to be the Halloween side of the sign. I'm going to teach you guys how to add this frame to our sign and then we're going to go ahead and paint it and then once it's dried we are going to add the stain and then we will add our HTV. So first thing that you want to do with your sign is you want to measure you want to know how large your frame is going to be. So with this this piece of wood is a nine it's nine inches in width anyway so it's fairly small when it comes to working with an area. So I decided to only leave a very very small like a half inch frame along the edge. So what you will need to do is decide how large you want your frame to be and then what we're going to do is we're just going to come in here and we're going to mark ever so often on that half inch mark. So we're going to come over here and we're going to measure half an inch and then we're going to do that all the way across the side. Once you have the sign marked all the way around what I'm doing now is I'm just coming in here with this straight edge and I'm making my marks. Once you have made your marks all across your sign what you're going to do now is you're going to take your painter's tape and you are going to lay that along the edge of your marks and you're just going to come in with your finger and make sure that is down nice and smooth. Now that we've got that taped off one thing that I want to make sure to let you guys know for best results if you want to you can give this a light sand. I have already given it a light sand before taping it off but that is what the sanding block is for just to give your whole sign a light sand. With the chalk paint if you are using a darker color black mainly covers everything up but because I'm using this white color this linen I did give this side a sand. So make sure that you do that before you start painting. I'm going to give this sign its first coat of paint. Now as you are painting your sign you can use we actually suggest that if you are painting the signs using a small roller. We just did not have any at this moment so you can as you can see you can use a brush. We use brushes all the time but with larger areas sometimes a roller will work best. Now that we have the first coat of paint on our sign we are actually going to set it aside and let it dry. You will need to do a second coat maybe even a third if you're doing a light color. Normally with these chalk paints two coats of paint do great however we did do the linen white so we're going to at least do two coats and then see how it looks after two. But now that we have this done we're going to set it aside and then we're going to hop over into design space. Now while we're waiting on our sign to dry here in design space we're going to start the process of designing our porch sign. So what I have done is I've actually measured the size that the painted area is and I have put in a guide two different guides one for each side in design space. Now this is you are going to have to work we're working at 25 percent because it's hard to see if you don't zoom it way out because of how tall this porch sign is. So one side is going to be our Halloween side and then one side is going to be our fall side. So on our Halloween side I'm going to show you what I want it to look like and how and then I'm teach you how to get there. So on our Halloween side we are wanting I'm going to have a cute little ghosty down here in the corner and it's going to say boo y'all. And then for our thing or our fall side we are going to have hey there pumpkin with a cute little pumpkin on the bottom and we are actually leaving room on the top of both of these signs so that we can add in a floral piece. So just keep that in mind that's why we're leaving the top the area up top is so we can put a floral piece there. So I'm going to hide these again and I'm going to walk you step by step on how to get to our finished product. First of all I'm going to show you guys and teach you guys how to download fonts from Maker's Going to Learn. We actually have two on this computer that are not downloaded so I'm going to head over to Maker's Going to Learn. The first one that we're going to be looking for is the sassy cow. That's the one that has that's the cow print that the let that the word boo was in. So I'm just going to search sassy cow it's going to come up and we're going to download this one. The next one we are going to search for is free spirit. Now you don't have to type in the whole word you can just type in the first part of the word and it will search for you. So right here free spirit I'm going to download that. So these are both zip files. We are now going to have to open each one of them separately open the font up and install it into our font book. So I'm going to go back to free spirit do the same thing open that up install the font into font book. Now to get them to work in design space we're going to go here to Cricut and I'm going to go to view and I'm going to reload. Now if you're working on something and you haven't saved it which I'm not changing anything here so I don't have to save it but if you are working on something and haven't saved in a while make sure you go ahead and save it before you hit reload or it will go back to the last saved time. So once again make sure you save it and then click reload. What that is going to do is that is going to reload Cricut design space. As you can see it went back to 100 percent so we're going to zoom right back out to 25 and then here it is. We're going to hide these and what that does is that uploads the font that you previously did not have on design space and it puts them in there. So now we're going to go over to text we're going to do the drop down search menu. Now the new Cricut update you do have to go to system for system font. So we are looking for a system font and first thing we're going to do is we're going to work with sassy cow. So I'm going to grab that from here. I'm just going to type out the word boo. Now the cool thing about the new design space feature is I can just move this in and look it already makes it vertical or you can move it out and it puts it back horizontal. So we are wanting this word to be vertical. So I'm moving it in from the sides to make it vertical and from there I'm going to move it over here and I'm going to size it up as large as I can. Okay so now we have our boo and you can move it up or down add things whatever you want. Next we're going to add the word y'all. So once again we already uploaded that font. I'm going to go in here to text. I'm going to change the font to free spirit. Go to system free spirit. I'm going to make that a little bit bigger so I can see it and then y'all. Now I'm going to take this and I'm going to move it down below. We're going to have to size it down to fit in our guide and then place it down here. So our next step what we are going to do and one thing that you can do to kind of keep things separate if you want to change your guide back to basic cut that way you can see what color background you're working with. So we know I know that my background is black so because the Halloween background side is black I'm not going to cut out boo out of black vinyl. So I'm going to change this to white. This way we kind of have more of an idea of exactly what our sign is going to look like and I'm going to change that to white. So now I want my little ghost here in the bottom. If you go to makers going to learn and search ghost it will come up. I have already downloaded it so I'm just going to go to you all and then if you've already downloaded an image this is a very good way a very good shortcut to check and see if you have downloaded it. I'm just going to type in ghost. So this is what the file looks like on the makers going to learn website. I'm going to select that and I'm going to add it to my canvas. From there I'm going to pull it over to the side and then I'm just going to ungroup these and then I'm going to delete out the ones that I don't want. We're going to change this little guy back to white pull him down here in the corner and then make him pretty big because we want him looking like he's coming up out of the corner of our sign. So now that we have him there I'm going to add in my cowboy hat because I want to put my cowboy hat on here first before I show you all how to slice out this edges the edge of this ghost so that it fits perfectly in your corner and that was a good guide for where you can start. So once again I'm going to go over here to upload you all this is one that we have recently so we're going to select this select our cowboy hat. Now as you can see it's just an outline. I don't want just an outline so what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate. I do want to work with the outline but I also want a solid color so I'm going to select this part go to contour and I'm going to hide all contours. That's just going to give you your basic shape. So now we know that I want my cowboy hat brown and then I have duplicated that so that lays right over top of there you can select both of them and arrange them or align them center so that it fits perfect. So now I'm just going to group those together that way they cut separately however they are I can move them together here so once I have that group together I'm going to move it down probably turn it just a little bit it does have to be within our parameter so it looks like our little ghost is too big for our cowboy hat to fit so we're going to size our little ghosty down pull our cowboy hat down let's move him over some and then from there you can actually space this out okay so once we have everything pretty well set one thing about this design is it can get I feel like it can get to where it looks kind of spread out a little bit um so what we're going to do what I'm going to show you now normally I say this is a cardinal sin and you never ever do this however with some fonts it works and it can work to your advantage so this font is locked which means it can only move up and down see nothing else changes however if you go up here to your size of your font this little button right here the lock button if you unlock that the cool thing about this is you can stretch your fonts once again if you are working with the image cardinal sin to unlock it and stretch it however sometimes with fonts it works to stretch it out just a little bit especially since we're working with a skinnier area so we're just going to stretch it down some and stretch it out so that we can fill up all of this area now once we have everything set now that we have it all set where we want it what I'm going to do now I'm going to slice off this excess of this ghost so that we know that it fits perfectly in the corner so what you're going to do we have turned this guide into a basic cut currently so you're going to select your ghost you're going to come over to your layers panel all the way at the bottom you're going to hit ctrl or command and select both of those layers now because we are working with two layers it is going to slice so we want to slice that out now if we go to the top we can see that our we have sliced off the bottom of our little ghosty so we want to because I want to still keep my guide together let's select both of these and we can actually delete that one out and turn this back into a guide and then we're going to move our little ghost we're going to arrange it and send it to back now that we have our Halloween side done we're now going to work on our autumn or fall side and the two fonts that we're going to be using today is insistence for pumpkin and demonstrate for hay there so what I'm going to do grab our text once again come up here we're looking for system fonts we are working with the demonstrate first we're going to make it larger so I can read it and then I'm just going to type hey there now from here because I want it to be fairly large if I were to size this down it would have to be super super small so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to move this side in so that they're on top of each other but then I'm going to ungroup to lines and the reason being is because I want to move this around so we are going to kind of size it down and you may have to zoom in some so we're going to size this down to fit within our guide and then does this one down as well I actually think I like that better so we're going to do not a capital t we're going to do a lowercase t and then we're going to size it on down some and I kind of think I like it touching let's size it down just a little more so this is really going to be a personal preference how you want it where you want it that's going to be totally up to you but I think we're going to do that and then once you are satisfied with the placement then you are going to select them both and you are going to weld them together so that they are one unit from there we're once again grabbing our text and then the text we're going to be using for this one we're going to systems insistence we're going make it larger all in capital letters we're going to pop out pumpkin zoom out and once again the new feature in design space is you can just move this in and then actually move this down there we go and now since it's all vertical we are going to resize once we have this sized down we're going to go up here to line spacing and we're actually going to pull our line spacing closer together that way we could still make it just a little bit bigger there we go boom now that we have this set we are going to add the pumpkin detail this is where you can download if you go and search pumpkin this will come up on makers going to learn.com we are going to add this to canvas now this is at at kind of a different angle than what I'm wanting so what I'm going to do is I'm going to ungroup this and I'm going to move this pumpkin out of the way my next step that I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to the shapes I'm going to grab a square I'm going to pull it over here probably just go ahead and unlock that and I'm going to make it large enough where it covers this side of the leaves now I'm going to select them both and I'm going to slice now the only reason I sliced this is so that I could move this around and kind of manipulate it and this other side the way that I want to so now I'm going to come in here size my pumpkin as large or as small as I want and then I'm going to size my floral pieces down change the angle a little bit now one thing to keep in mind is it does still look small but this is still a very large piece so we're going to size it down even more move this pumpkin I'm actually going to change the angle of it just a hair and then we're going to grab this actually what you can do is once you have this one set and the angle that you want it you can duplicate it pull it over slip it horizontally bring it in select these both align them center and now what you could do as well if you wanted to you can select your pumpkin and your guide and then we're going to align them and we're going to center them horizontally so that our pumpkin is centered within our guide we are now going to cut our design out of htv now obviously this is a very large design one thing I want to make sure you guys know and understand is make sure that your letters stay within the 24 inch 12 by 24 inch for the most part if you want them to stay together now one thing I do want to show you just in case you are not working with a 24 inch piece of vinyl or you only have 12 by 12 or a shorter piece of vinyl one thing that you can do we'll go back to design space and I'm going to do this on the word pumpkin what you want to do is you're going to want to ungroup these and select them one at a time so we're going to start with a p okay our p is two inches in height and our u makes it six so if you have a 12 by 12 mat or piece of vinyl you can still select more so now we're at nine inches okay let's try the other p okay we're over the 12 inches now so what you are going to want to do is go back deselect this p or select these three and then you are going to attach them together okay and then start with these so p k six nine the n still over 12 so we're just going to select these three and then attach and so that only leaves your n only leaves you having to line up your n so now when you cut when you go to cut so let's change this color so it doesn't show up on that mat so we're going to go to make it and then we're going to go down to our pumpkin so as you can see the word pumpkin p u m is grouped is attached together p k i is attached together and the n is the only thing separate so technically speaking you can fit it on a 12 by 12 mat and still have room to cut other things if you want to that's just a little bit of a hack or a tidbit of information that i wanted to let you guys in on because i ran into that problem myself where the piece of vinyl that i wanted to work with was not long enough to accommodate the full 24 inches so i had to group my letters together and i think it was two at a time so what we're gonna do when we add this to our sign you're gonna see that i have two letters two letters three letters so we're going to line it up manually that's the easiest way that i have to tell you yes it is a manual lineup however you can use a straight edge and get those straight try your best to get them as straight as possible but that's the easiest way for me to teach you how to use it if you do not have 24 inches in length of vinyl to cut from now this is htv that we are going to be using so what you need to do is you need to make sure all of your images are mirrored because when you are cutting htv you have to be cutting a mirrored image what that does you're going to put shiny side down on your mat you'll weed it and then we're going to turn it over and add it to our sign now before we start adding our vinyl to our sign we're actually going to take off the tape and i'm going to stain the edges to give us that frameless framed look so now i'm just going to be taking up this tape and i'm actually going to tape it take it up from the bottom down here one thing i will say is i love frog tape i know scotch makes a good tape and i do love the blue painter's tape the scotch blues painter's tape but man frog tape to me just gives me such a good crisp line so what i am going to do before i stain this i'm actually going to come in with an eraser and i'm going to erase this pencil mark that i put on here by accident first as best as possible best as i can now one thing that i will say if you are doing it all black you can just go ahead and come in and stain this and on this side we are going to do that and i'll show you you don't have to tape it off however since we are using a cream color on this side i highly suggest that you take your take some tape and i'm going to actually tape off the inside that way it doesn't get on this early american stain does not get on our cream paint now one thing i'm doing right here is i'm just coming through and cutting off these corners so that they are straight edges across and we'll add our last little bit of tape one other thing i'm going to do before i start before i add the stain is i'm going to do a light sand on the outside edges of this little frame now that we have that sanded i'm going to go ahead and put my glove on and we are going to start staining the outside of our sign now one of the best practices when it comes to staining is having a another dry cloth or a paper towel handy that way you can wipe away the excess so we're just going to open our stain up this is a well of stain we do not have very much of it left so we're just going to put some on an old rag and then i'm going to come in and just stain these edges now one thing i do want to make sure you all are super careful about especially with this white layer is trying your best not to get fingerprints on it because as you can see i was not paying attention and got my fingerprints on it right here which i can kind of buff out a little bit and really and truly if you have to you can kind of come in here with a sanding block and just kind of buff it out and not mess it up so now that we have that we're going to pull up our edge now if the stain for some reason gets in the grain and gets on your beige layer or your lighter layer what you can do is just go in here and just kind of touch it up just a little bit or you could even bring in your paint and do just fine touch-up work either one it really just depends on how precise you want to get now that we have our frame stained we are going to start the process of adding our htv to our sign now remember with our halloween design we had our little ghost that has the corner so that's where we're going to start with this one specifically we're going to start down here in the corner and we're just going to line him up down here with our corner black corner and then we are going to come in here with a mini easy press with a heat setting of two and we are going to heat this on to our wood sign now we are going to add this little hat now we're just lining up the hat detail we're going to add that on now we're going to line up the word boo and y'all before we really press it down first i'm going to press y'all down and then we're going to press boo one thing i am going to do when doing boo because htv on wood seems to do a little better with a as soon as you put it down peel it now i'm just going to go through and make sure that's all down so now other than our floral piece at the top we have our halloween side done now i'm going to flip it over and do our fall side now this design is not one where we can start at the bottom have a guide and go up so i'm actually going to lay all of these out first before i'm start before i start pressing them down so we're going to start with our pumpkin toward the bottom and then add our leaves just to give us an idea of how much room we are working with okay so i'm actually going to move this pumpkin on down toward the very bottom and i'm going to start the process of pressing so now we're going to start with our word um again you all know we don't like to measure around here alicia and i are queens of the eyeball game so don't come for us for not measuring and getting it precise and there we have it now it is just ready to add the floral detail on the top to both sides i know this has been a long project but i really hope that you all have enjoyed it porch signs are super popular right now and i hope you have learned different ways of designing how to put htv on wood how to create a frameless frame there are so many different things that we covered in this video now if you liked all of the cut files and fonts that we used and you would like to join makers going to learn you can at makers going to learn.com join we are a crafting community where we bring you education motivation and inspiration to start using your picket i hope you all have enjoyed our 13 days of following crafts so far and i can't wait to see what you all create and i will see you guys in the next one bye