Love Around the World Sign {Tutorial}

I cannot believe how crazy the weather has been. I live in Southeastern Michigan and we’ve had warm, icy cold, snow, rain, sun and extremely high winds…all in the last few days. One day last week we had all four seasons in one day. Last night the electricity kept flickering, I am pleasantly surprised we were spared an outage. My home is chilly enough with the heat on! Anyway, it was a perfect weekend to stay in and work on some projects. Some computer issues took up the whole day Saturday, but today I was able to get my Valentine’s Day sign completed. I came up with the idea awhile back to have the word love in several different languages. I just wasn’t sure how I wanted to make it. I do not have a Silhouette machine (I really hope to get one this year), and I am no good doing things freehand.

I Googled the words for love in Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch and Hungarian. I then went into Microsoft Word and made each word in Lucida Handwriting font, size 72. For “LOVE” I used all caps and font size 160. I have had issues with my MS Word, so you may need to adjust the sizes. It also depends on your board size. Mine is 21 1/2 by 11. I used a light pink color but then decided to glitter them up. I used a glue pen to go over the words and then sprinkled them with Martha Stewart’s glitter in Kunzite. I don’t think you can ever have too much glitter

For the sign I used this piece of thin pressed wood that I kept from a broken drawer.

The first step was to paint it. I did one overall coat using a sample jar of Glidden’s Marshmallow White. That did not fully cover the funny color of the wood so I gave it a thin coat of DecoArt’s White Blanc. I wanted a bit of pink in it so while the second coat was still wet I brushed in a little bit of Folk Art’s Baby Pink. I didn’t really have a specific look in mind but I do like how it turned out.

I apologize that at this point it would have been better to show you two pictures, one of the sign painted without the words on it yet and the words glittered and cut out before being glued on. However when I get going on a project I get so wrapped up in finishing it that stopping to take more pictures usually gets overlooked.
I had cut out the words (printed on plain copy paper) with fancy edged scissors and glued them on with Mod Podge. Before gluing them on I did position them on the board to make sure they fit/looked right.

I have not attached anything to the back yet for hanging because it is propped up on these shelves in the living room. If I decide to hang it I will probably add some Valentine’s Day ribbon from the Dollar Tree to the back. it took a total of a couple hours to finish (paint drying time included) but it really was easy. Also, the cost would be fairly low even if you had to go and buy all of the supplies. That makes it a pretty sweet idea right there, eh?