Awesomeness

This is the pinterest post that inspired this project...

This may be one of my favorite Pinterest Projects so far! We have been a little obsessed with How I Met Your Mother on Netflix lately, and though this isn't an exact quote from Barney Stinson, I believe he says "whenever I am sad, I stop being sad and be AWESOME instead", it is still a quote that makes me happy every time I see it.

I started by taking some extra wood that was for our fence but had been laying in the grass for the past several years. It was a little ant infested and it took a couple days of washing and brushing to completely get rid of the ants. I do like how there are a couple of rotted ant tunnels on my board though. I got out my husbands saw and for the first time ever cut the boards myself. I cut 6 boards 31 inches tall, it is crazy how hard it was for me to make a straight cut on a 4 inch board! It kept curving at the end but I figured that some of these imperfections would only make the board more awesome! After I lined the boards up I cut two more boards to drill perpendicular on the back to hold it all together. I thought one screw on each board would be okay but the boards still shifted so I added two screws to each board. I told my super crafty friend Melissa that I would make her a big board if she would make a stencil on her Cricut machine, I think I totally got the easy job! Each word was its own stencil so we lined them up on the board and taped it all together in hopes that we could transfer it to the next board. I rolled over all the letters very carefully and when it came time to remove the stencil we discovered that the paper had stuck to the paint so we had to tear it off and ruin the stencil, boo. But my board looked AWESOME!! We ran a sander over the entire board and roughed up all the edges and high spots pretty good, and wa la, here it is!

I felt bad that I ruined the stencil Melissa had made, but she decided to take a different approach, she cut out the letters on her Cricut and modge podged them onto her board, it turned out super cute. She did two of each letter and created a sort of shadow effect, the picture doesn't do it justice!

The best part about this project was that we used boards that were just rotting in my yard, screws I found on my husbands work table, leftover house paint, scrapbook paper that we always have on hand, and sponge rollers and paintsticks that I already had. The only thing I had to buy was a hanging kit that was less than $2!! On a crafters scale of 1-10 I give this project a 7.5, Making the board was easier than I expected but unless you have a Cricut and know how to use it, or unless you have an uber talented friend willing to make the stencilfor you, I don't even know how one would pull it off... but it could be Awesome to try! :)