Birch Wood Sign for Valentine's Day | Valentines DIY Decor | Heart Banner and Cute Saying Vday Cra

Thanks for joining me today you guys to make a fun valentine's day themed craft. I'm Melissa from Welcome to the Woods and we're going to be first cutting out little paper hearts in a darker pink and a lighter pink with this punch. You can find this punch linked in the description of this video. Once I had all of my little hearts punched out I'm going to be hot gluing them onto jute rope. So this is really easy. I use my Surebonder hot glue gun to hot glue each of the paper hearts every inch or so. You might remember that I mentioned earlier I wanted to make another birch look wood sign so that's what this project is going to be. Since valentine's day is a winter holiday I thought the birch tree look would work great. I started by painting all my boards just white with acrylic wall paint. I got these boards that are heavily textured to look like faux cedar from what was basically wrapped around protecting our new garage door. I thought to myself I definitely can use these and so this is what I came up with. To make them look like birch I'm coming in with this deco art multi-surface acrylic craft paint in a wash. So that just means I'm adding the black paint to a bunch of water and running my wide paintbrush along the edges of each of these boards. Then I'm using an old rag to just wipe away and kind of blend in some of that wash and the excess. This gives the boards a three-dimensional look. I did this for all the boards and when I was done I came in with my paintbrush and again the wash to make lines across the boards that look like a birch tree. Now this is really subjective and you can kind of play around with what you think looks most realistic. I just pulled up a picture of a birch tree on my computer. I also came in with some areas that were meant to look like imperfections to give that more realistic look. If you guys are loving what you're seeing so far don't forget to click share on this video. I would love to inspire other people to make their own wall decor and you can really dress up this project to be for winter, Christmas, or like I'm doing for Valentine's Day. You can actually see another variation of this craft I did long ago to make a joy sign with a wreath in the center for Christmas time. Now the next step was to basically let it dry and then flip all the boards over. You can see that this was actually made out of just this old chipboard which is not a very good quality wood but it's going to work fine for this because this is just decoration. I flipped them over and made sure that the ones especially that I was having lined up next to each other to be a thicker looking trunk were lined up really close and tight so that it looked realistic. The runner boards are just leftover pieces of trim that I had and I am screwing in one inch drywall screws to connect everything together. Now of course I'm going to be doing some of my signature which is hand lettering. I am freehand lettering the adorable phrase cold hands warm hearts to decorate this birch sign and I just kind of wrote out what I liked. You can see that the heavily textured boards are making it a little hard for me to get a crisp look but I thought that this font combination and this look would be really adorable. A thing I like to do when I'm not using brushes or calligraphy pens is just come in and fill in the down strokes to be thicker than all the other lines. This gives the look of faux calligraphy and really makes your hand lettering look more professional even if you start out writing it not so good. Now I'm using a oil-based sharpie paint pen and I recommend buying one of these if you want to decorate wood because the oil base really sits on top of whatever paint you have underneath and it goes on beautifully both stained and painted wood. Now I'm hanging that adorable heart banner that we made in the beginning of this video both the dark pink and the light pink one to decorate this sign for Valentine's Day. I think this craft turned out very very cute and is very customizable. Tell me your thoughts on this project in the comments below and don't forget to tag your valentine and share it with them. For something more neutral you could also just add a winter wreath. Thanks so much for watching we'll catch you next time and welcome to the woods!