Pottery Barn Inspired Sign

I'm excited to show you my latest project! 

So, after Christmas, I was having a difficult time figuring out what to fill up the glaring white space above my mantle. After some brainstorming and Pinterest surfing, I came up with this:

I don't want you to think that I came up with this idea on my own {it's important to give credit where credit is due, right?}. Pottery Barn was my inspiration.

I started with a wood pallet. We tried to disassemble it without breaking the boards, but that didn't go so well. The nails that they use to hold pallets together are ridiculously hard to pull out because they have little hook thing-a-ma-bobs on them. So, I {well, Jeff} decided to cut them off and piece the smaller pieces together like a puzzle. Jeff used the circular saw to cut them to the size I wanted {he was a trooper :0) }. After piecing it all together, we glued it {gorilla glue} to some leftover plywood we had laying around the garage.

Then, I pulled out my handy-dandy homemade wood stain. I made it a long time ago following Kara Paslay's tutorial. It looks rather nasty, but I LOVE it!!

When you first apply the stain, you can't really tell that anything is happening, but just wait a few minutes and you will see it begin to work. The stain reacts differently to different types of wood, so I was curious how my sign would turn out. After about half an hour, I started to get nervous because it was getting SO dark. However, I just let it sit for a day and it toned back down. Crazy, huh? 

Now, the tricky part of transferring images onto wood {or any other surface} is that you have to mirror the image before printing it. I couldn't figure out how to do that without first converting the number to an image. Does that make sense? As far as I know, you can't mirror text. {Please someone tell me if I'm wrong!}

I was using Microsoft Word on Jeff's Mac. During my quest to figure out how to mirror my numbers, I discovered something pretty cool. Just like a PC has a "print screen" option, with a Mac you can do something even more cool.Command+Shift+4: brings up a selection box so you can specify an area to take a screenshot of, then save it as a file to the desktop. Cool, huh? {I found this out here}. Maybe that isn't news to you, but it made my day! 

Anyway, so after I had converted my numbers into an image, I imported the image of the numbers back into my Word document, selected it, mirrored/flipped it, and then printed {I have a regular inkjet printer}!

Here is what I used to make my sign. 

So, I planned out where I wanted my numbers to go, and then picked a place to start. I laid my first number face down, lightly brushed some water onto the backside of the number, and then began to carefully rub my flat utensil back and forth to "transfer" the ink to the wood. You can use a variety of different items to rub the paper.

The numbers were pretty faded, so I just took some chalkboard paint {yes, chalkboard paint}, watered it down a lot, and lightly painted over the most faded numbers.

And that was it! I bought some heavy duty hooks from Hobby Lobby for $2 and Jeff hung it up for me.

I absolutely love how it turned out, and the best part was that it cost me a grand total of $5!!!

I have entered into the "Creative Bloggers Got Talent Contest"! Please vote for me! All ya gotta do is click on the link above, find me {I'm #15 & #16}, and then click "like"!!! How easy is that? :0) Thanks, friends!

I'm also linking up here:

{connect with Emily here}