diy: weathered sign

There is the coolest abandoned hotel down the street from my house. It's set into the side of a hill and probably only has maybe 6 or 7 rooms in the entire thing. It hasn't been open since 1980 and the sign in the front is so awesome I love it! My friend and I would always joke how we were going to take it, but now that we both have a place we figured we could try and make one for our pretty bare freshly moved in walls.... and then back light it!

The first part of this whole challenge was to figure out how to make the sign look as weathered and old as the original. There is a great tutorial on youtube that shows you how to do it with Elmer's glue and a hair dyer.

It worked so well!! I found a picture of the sign online and made a stencil, and printed it out proportionate to the size we wanted it. Cut plywood in the shape that we wanted it and then spray painted it black. After that dried, we took glue and painted the entire sign with that and then painted over it with white paint and let it dry. It was so crackley!! And so much cheaper than the paint that does it (apparently there's a glaze you can get at the store that will do the same thing, but it's ALOT more expensive than glue)

After all that dried and looked awesome we took the big stencil and an excto-knife and cute out the letters and the bird. Pretty much did the same thing with the glue and the paint with each letter only each one we did individually and then used a hair dryer to dry them to make the crackly crack more cracktastic. It worked. After all said and done we shellacked it, glue some rope lights to the back and then hung it from the ceiling above the couch. It came out so great I'm really happy with the finished product! and we didn't have to steal the sign in the middle of the night after all!