A little change

Hey there!
I've been posting a lot of jewelry lately but in this post I am going to show you a sign that I created for my sister and her husband.  I took pictures along the way as I was making it, in hopes of being able to show step-by-step how I accomplished the end-game.  Enjoy.

I started with a plain board sign that I had purchased some time ago from Uppercase Living.  It had some sticker words on it that I removed for this project.

I painted a base coat of simple white acrylic paint, to start the project with a clean slate.

Next, I added a couple coats of Americana's Turquoise Blue acrylic paint.  I love this color!

Then I went and designed a layout in Sure-Cuts-A-Lot (SCAL) for my Cricut.  I wanted the sign to work in my sister's lake house, which they nicknamed Wawatopia.  It also had to accomodate their decorating sense and nautical colors. 
After much consideration, this is the design I came up with.

 I cut the design out of a deep red vinyl that I had on hand.
The Nautical logo came from the Cricut "Graphically Speaking" cartridge.


Once I had the design cut and applied to the sign, I then used an opaque marker and added some white accents where I felt they were needed.
This step really made the letters pop and I'm glad I did it.

When I got to this point, I decided that the sign needed some texture, so I went out on a limb and covered the whole thing using Ranger's Crackle Accents (and prayed that it would look good in the morning!).

Viola, it worked and looked awesome.

 I made this picture x-large in hopes of showing the detail from adding the crackle coating.

Here is the final product, sorry for the flash.

Hope it gives you some inspiration to reuse/redo something in your house that you aren't enjoying as much as you could.  This was  really inexpensive way to accomplish that and have a terrific gift to give as well.

Thanks for looking!