Custom Wood & Resin Sign

Today I have a really cute Cricut project for you… a wooden sign (embellished with resin!) for your front door (or even a gallery wall). The best part of this little sign is that it’s completely customizable… so you can choose the shape of your sign, you can choose whether to use resin or not (and what color to make that resin!) and you can even pick what your sign says!

I picked the word “gather” as it’s a fairly neutral word that could fit in plenty of places (the front door, the kitchen, the living room… even my office!) but I actually think this would be a super cute sign for a last name. “the Smiths” est 2014!! But since you’ll be adding your words to your sign yourself it can say whatever you like!

Maybe “Unless you have girl scout cookies we aren’t buying!” would work.

Either way let’s get started!

Supplies:

*For a full Resin Supply List Click Here!

Step 1: Prep Your Cut Files

First things first… in order to make this little sign we do need to do a bit of work in Cricut Design Space. You’ll start by making your actual sign… for this we need 2 circles that are 10 by 10. This will fit perfectly on our sheet of Basswood when we cut it out.

Next we’ll need our word (or words). For my sign I used the font “Autumn in November” to write out the word Gather and then centered it on my sign. You’ll notice that it’s a little lower than the actual middle of our circle… this is so we can add a bow to the top of our sign later. If you’d prefer to skip the bow you can place your word higher here.

Once you have your word where you like it and written in a font you like go ahead and weld that word together. We want it to cut out as one piece and not several pieces!

Perfect! Now that our letters are welded into one big word go ahead and create an offset for your word (this will essentially be the portion of our sign we fill with resin so we want it to be a fairly large space. The default for an offset is .25 and I bumped it up to .43 before hitting apply. You can make it even larger but I thought this fit well on our sign.

Once your offset is created you’ll select the offset layer and one of your circle layers (the one it’s on top of) and select the slice tool. This will cut our offset shape out of our circle! Then you can delete the offset layer leaving us with one complete circle, one circle with the offset cut out and our letters welded into one word.

At this point we’re ready to cut! Go ahead and change the color of your welded word (I picked pink but it can be any color you like) changing colors of our layers simply tells your Cricut that we want to cut these two shapes out of different materials.

In this case our gray shapes will be cut out of Basswood and our pink shape will be cut out of vinyl. Now let’s get started on the actual cutting!

Step 2: Cut your Materials

Are you ready to cut this little sign!? I am! Let’s start with our Basswood… keep in mind that not all Cricut machines can cut Basswood so you’ll need to be working with a machine that is compatible with the knife blade.

Then we can prep our materials.

To cut Basswood you’ll put it in the top left corner of a strong grip cutting mat. Then you’ll use your brayer to firmly press the Basswood to the cutting mat… making sure the two pieces are really bonded together so our wood doesn’t shift during cutting. In order to cut through the Basswood it will have to make several passes so this is an important step!

We’ll also use a bit of blue painters tape to firmly secure your edges to the cutting mat.

Perfect!

And don’t worry if this is your first time with the knife blade, Cricut Design Space will let you know all of this prep information before you hit cut.

Last but not least you’ll want to load your knife blade and slide those star wheels all the way to the right… they will leave little grooves all the way across your Basswood otherwise! Then hit go and watch the magic happen!

It may take a few minutes but it’s still a pretty fun process!

Once your Basswood is cut you can go ahead and cut your vinyl… this is much easier. You’ll add your vinyl to a cutting mat (or directly into the machine if you’re working with smart materials) and then switch back to the standard fine point blade. Then hit go!

Once it’s done you’ll be able to weed the negative spaces out of your vinyl and be left with your word “Gather” ready to be added to your sign. Go ahead and put this to the side for now… we need to prep our sign before we’re ready to bust out the transfer tape!

Step 3: Build your Sign!

Alright now we’re cooking with gas! Now that all of our pieces are cut out we can glue them together… we need one solid sign for this to work after all. Not two separate pieces!

To start with make sure your wooden circle with the offset is face up (you’ll need it to match your vinyl word eventually!) then flip it over… and add wood glue to the back.

Make sure it’s thoroughly spread out and then lay it carefully on the fully round wooden circle and firmly push them together. You can use a damp rag or paper towel to remove any wood glue that oozes out from the seams… make sure it’s fully cleaned up!

Then you’ll want to clamp the pieces together or place them under something heavy over night… giving that wood glue plenty of time to set.

Just make sure if you do place it under something heavy it’s not something that could accidentally be glued to your sign! I typically use a heavy book and that could definitely be glued with a bit of wood glue *wink wink* so I made sure to place a piece of parchment paper between the sign and my book to keep the book safe.

Genius.

Once the glue has cured it’s time to paint this baby! I went with white so my resin would stand out but feel free to use any color you like!

Then it’s time for the best part… the resin!

Step 4: Add your Resin

If you’ve never mixed resin before you may want to jump into my How to Mix Resin for Beginners Tutorial. It’s a simple process with a 1:1 mix ratio but you’ll want to have all your necessary safety gear and learn how to mix your resin and hardener properly so they’ll cure. Keep in mind that this little offset section of our sign is pretty shallow… so you won’t need much resin. This is a great piece to do with a larger project (to utilize the leftover resin) but if you’re doing it by itself I would mix about 50ml of resin.

If that!

Once your resin is mixed I separated mine into four small containers: one for white, one for blush pink, one for a dark copper and one for rose gold flakes.

Then I added my resin to my sign and swirled it around a bit… I wanted a very subtle geode pattern that was still solid enough that you can read my words on top. If you make it to busy your words may become illegible.

And that’s not good for anyone!

Once you’ve poured your resin you’ll want to set your sign in a cool, dry environment (on a level surface) for roughly 24 hours to cure. Then we can add our finishing touches!

Step 5: Add your Vinyl

We’re onto the final step! Our vinyl, cut out word that we set aside earlier! It will fit perfectly into our resin spot since we used an offset to cut it out… so all we have to do is transfer it.

Go ahead and grab a bit of transfer tape and pick up that word… then carefully place it down, making sure it’s centered before pressing it into place and removing the transfer tape.

Volia!

We’re finished!

At this point I added a bit of ribbon to the top of our sign so we can hang it anywhere we like… and a little bow… for cuteness!

I absolutely love how this turned out!!! It would look super cute on top of a big floral wreath or in the middle of a gallery wall! You could make a few of them in different colors for Christmas presents! Or one for a newlywed couple as a wedding gift.

The possibilities are endless!