Knock Off Train Depot Sign

I have a wall in my craft room where I tape up pics torn out of magazines. I’ve had a picture of a vintage train depot sign taped up on the wall forever and finally got around to making it. I am just smitten with it. It’s super cute and it was super free.

At some point when I was single, I decided that I didn’t need a TV in the bedroom. I think I heard that you shouldn’t do anything in bed but sleep; reading and watching TV in bed somehow lowers your quality of sleep or something… Sleep is super high on my list of priorities, so I put my bedroom TV in a closet. Then I met the Hubs who argued that no man on earth can live without a TV in their bedroom. Fine. We’ve had a TV in our bedroom for years now and it totally drives me crazy. Until a few months ago… it broke. I hate to rejoice over something as costly as a broken TV but… sleep. He “needs it” to sleep while I prefer complete silence. We left it up on the wall for a few months, mostly because it was mounted and I didn’t want to deal with the hole repair.

One day in a fit of OCD cleaning and organizing, I decided that I was done with this broken TV hanging on the wall and I was going to do something about it. I remembered my vintage train depot sign taped up on my inspiration wall and headed out to the garage to check on my scrap pile. Yyyyahtzee! I had everything I needed to make it leftover from our vintage inspired diner kitchen calendar.

I cut some scrap pieces of wood and screwed a leftover piece of masonite on ’em.

I also added a piece of wood down the middle but didn’t snap a pic of that. I flipped ‘er over and slathered it in chalk paint and then used various randoms to distress the sign in the same places as they were in the magazine cut out. Then I took it down to the craft room to do the stencil work with the silhouette. I did a mock up of the entire sign at actual size in Photoshop.

I saved it as a jpeg and put it into the Silhouette Cameo software … aka the fussiest software on the planet.

The actual size of the sign is something like 3.5 feet by 2 feet… I dunno, that’s a guess, but its way bigger than the size material the Silhouette will take so, rather than keep the proper spacing and waste a ton of vinyl, I crammed the text into two 12×24 sheets.

Before doing the stenciling, I mapped out the lines on the board using the measurements I used in the Photoshop mock up. I tried a ruler with a white paint pen at first but it didn’t stand out very well so I taped off the lines using frog tape and painted it using some leftover white paint.

Then I stenciled, being so careful to keep everything right where it was supposed to be…

After the white paint was dry, I went over the entire board with a piece of chalk to make it look like it was actually heavily used and not a brand new thing I just whipped up from garage-trash.

Did I mention how careful I was being? I was being so careful. At least I thought I was, Nicky Minaj can be very distracting…

I started the train number column too high and didn’t even realize it. Not even after taking this pic.

It wasn’t until we got in bed that night and hubs said “Oh, did you mean to mess it up like that?”

Ugh. I didn’t sleep well that night and took it down the next day and fixed it. You can see where I made the correction but, oh well, I still love it.

And here it is compared to the magazine cut out:

I was so proud of how I got all the spacing and scratches exactly the same as the image…  Which is what made the obvious spacing mistake so offensive to me.

But, whatever. At least it’s not a broken TV. This thing perfectly covers all the holes I was way too lazy to patch.

The sign now lives above our new one dollar campaign dresser right where the orange dresser used to be.

Free. Number one on my list of favorite things…

Well, maybe number two, right after sleep.