Seas and Greetings & Wooden Sign

Twas 2 days before Christmas, and I still have a holiday project to share with you, so here goes:

This was another project that kinda just came about one day, and was inspired from a few other coastal Christmas things I’ve seen on Pinterest and around town. I originally bought the piece of wood to possibly use for my side tables in the guest room (more about those soon), but found something else, so had this piece sitting in my garage, and my wheels started turning…

Seas and Greetings Wooden Sign

What you’ll need:

Piece of wood
Driftwood wood stain
Paint brush
Clean cloth
Sander
Oyster shells
Starfish
Liquid cement (Goo)
Pencil
White acrylic paint
Small paint brush

The piece of wood is from Lowe’s, and it’s ~16″ x 30″. I like it because it’s actually made of several 1 inch pieces of wood, so the grain is more interesting than a basic piece of oak. The first step was to stain the wood and give it a more worn, rustic look.

I still had some driftwood colored wood stain leftover from the stocking holders I made last year, and thought it’d be the perfect color. The first step is to stain your wood. Apply the stain, let it sit 1-2 minutes, then wipe the excess off with a clean, lint free cloth.

I repeated this step 3 times before I was happy with the color of the wood, and how the original wood was coming through.

For more of a rustic, and weathered look, I sanded down the edges some so it wasn’t perfectly straight. Yes, I knew this was going to remove some of the stain in those areas.. That’s the joy of going with the flow, and coming up with your own way of making something!

After sanding the edges, I ended up not wanting to add another coat of stain – I liked the worn look. I ended up completing all of these steps before December got crazy, so this was just sitting in the garage for a few weeks, waiting to be finished (cue more weathering, maybe?).

Next, pick out some oyster shells to attach to the board, and arrange them in a Christmas tree shape. Then I attached the shells, one by one, with liquid cement (I found that hot glue wasn’t strong enough to hold them), and the starfish on top! Using flat shells is key here, otherwise they will be harder to attach to the wood.

Since I was doing this on the ground, Cleo had to investigate..

The last step was to paint a holiday saying on it. I always like the Christmas phrases with a coastal play on them, so I opted for ‘Seas and Greetings.’ First, I sketched out the letters with pencil…

…Then I painted over the pencil with white paint and adjusted as necessary.

Since it’s kinda large, it doesn’t really fit anywhere in our house, so I decided to add it to the Christmas decor by our front door!

I wanted this to be done in November, but it took longer than I expected to finish, and that’s okay (such is life, right?). Now it’s done and looks great outside, and I’ll have it ready to go out early next year 🙂

Merry Christmas!