Subway Art the Hard Way for the Laundry Room

I love the way everyone has been making subway art signs and have been wanting to try one for a long time.

So when planning out the laundry room re-do, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try my hand at one.

Our ironing board finally bit the dust a month ago.  This was no ordinary ironing board, but a genuine wooden vintage board that I had picked up for $2 at the Salvation Army a couple  years ago.

It needed a crack repaired back then so I fixed it with wood glue and mending plates and  it was as good as new.

We (actually Mike) used it for the last 2 years as our ironing board.  Now Mike likes to iron while watching TV in the evening, and he irons ALL our clothes, so the ironing board is almost a permanent fixture in the living room.  I didn’t mind so much, at least it was vintage and blended in with the decor.

This time though, the leg broke in a bad place and I could not fix it.  So sad!

So instead of throwing it away I decided to make it the base for my subway art.

I just love the old wood on this thing.

I was a bit at a disadvantage, not having access to a Cricut or Silhouette machine, so I went about doing this the hard way.

First I took a photo of the ironing board surface, then played around with it in Picasa using the text feature.  I worked on positioning then tried out a million different fonts to get one I liked that would be fairly easy to trace.

This is what I came up with for a pattern.

 

I printed the words out on my printer, then took some carbon paper and traced them on the ironing board surface.

Talk about doing things the hard way!

I decided to make the letters black, but had no black paint markers and just the thought of brushing paint on and staying in the lines was too daunting. 

I ended up using black Sharpie markers.

I really flunked at spacing the words evenly.

The end result was way too dark and crisp for me.  And where the heck did that big space come from above the L?

After sanding down the words to give them a faded old look, I found some white pickling stain in my stash.

Yuck!

It didn’t absorb evenly.  I just didn’t care for how it looked.

  

Then there was that big blank spot to deal with too. 

I filled in the space with 5¢ in red.

Next I used a brown glaze over it all to minimize the uneven white stain.   

   

Ahhh, much better!

 

And there you have it, my version of Subway art for the laundry room.

It was such a pain to do that I broke down and ordered a Silhouette on Cyber Monday using a special code from Becky’s Infarrantly Creative blog.  The deal was too good to pass up, and if only I had had it earlier this thing would have been a breeze to do!

 

Soon I’ll be able to hang it up in place….

Rose

 

I’m linking this one up to Gail’s Catch as Catch Can party

Frugal Friday at the Shabby Nest

Everything but the Kitchen Sink at a Little Knick Knack

Saturday Night Special At Funky Junk Interiors

Make it for Monday at Cottage Instincts

Nifty Thrifty Tuesday at Coastal Charm