Joy Wooden Block Sign

Ready for another Christmas DIY? This was another project we did when my sister was in town in October (told you we did a lot that weekend!). I think the pin she saw for a Joy sign was actually 3 pieces of wood, but as we were looking for materials we found one piece that would fit the bill for us, so like usual we made up our own project!

Note: This post contains affiliate links, so if you purchase something from them a little bit goes back to help support my blog!

What you’ll need:

Raw wooden sign
White acrylic paint
Sponge Brush
Cricut Maker
Stencil vinyl
Weeder tool
Transfer paper
Scraper tool
Mod Podge
Gold acrylic paint
Dark green acrylic paint
Red acrylic paint
Paint brush

So the gist of the project is to create a sign with JOY on it where the O is a holly wreath. The first thing I did was to use some white acrylic paint and paint the wooden sign that we found. Let it dry.

Now I needed to find a good holly wreath image that I could use in my stencil. Then I uploaded it into Design Space as a cut image.

Next I added the letters J and Y and rearranged it so they were in the right order. The sign was about 10″ wide so I resized the letters and image to be the same height,center aligned them, attached all of them, then set the width of the entire set to be 9″ wide. This is what my canvas looked like:

Now you’re ready to cut! Load your stencil vinyl on the mat, set the material and let the Maker cut! Then weed out the part that you’ll eventually paint. This is opposite from vinyl projects so I always have to double check I’m doing it right before starting.

The next step is to add some transfer paper and put it on top of the design. You’ll do this to keep the stencil in place as you move it to the wood. Use the scraper tool to make sure the transfer tape is on there well.

By now your sign should be dry and it’s time to put the stencil on. Remove the backing from the stencil, put it on top of the wood and use the scraper again to ensure the stencil vinyl is adhered to the wood. Then remove the transfer paper slowly, making sure that the stencil vinyl stays on the wood.

Now it’s time for the trick I learned at AR Workshop – use something like Mod Podge to seal the stencil to the wood so you’ll get crisp lines. Dab a little bit of the Mod Podge on the edges of your stencil with a sponge brush. Let it dry.

Then you’ll paint! We decided to do the J and Y in gold and the wreath in green and red. First we used the gold. Softly dab the paint on – you can always do another layer or two later – but dabbing will help the paint not get under the stencil. Then you’ll do the green for the wreath. Let everything dry and do additional layers as necessary.

When everything is dry it time to remove the stencil. Slowly pull the stencil vinyl away, leaving the painted letters with nice crisp lines!

The last step was to add the red berries to the wreath with a paint brush. We added 3 “berries” every little bit on the wreath. We also touched up a corner of the sign where the vinyl pulled some of the white paint off (we weren’t trying to make the sign rustic, but if you are do some light sanding!).