Wedding wood signs!

When we decided on having a backyard wedding, I immediately dreamed of having yard games, hand picked garden flowers all over the place, fabric flags, hanging bulb lights, paper lanterns hung from the tree, bamboo parasols, cute chalk boards, lots of black and white photo's hung on twine with clothespins, and my favorite: hand painted wood signs!  

Crafting resources are definitely scarce in Korea, but lucky for us, there is absolutely NO lack of old distressed wood pallets laying around! Aaron and I jumped on the scooter yesterday afternoon and rode around the neighborhood, looking for wood crates to take apart and use for the wood signs that I'd dreamed of having!  

We found a place with an awesome old wood crate leaning up against a wall, and asked the old guy working there if we could have it.  Lucky for us, he was more than happy to give it to us and actually even grabbed a crow bar and took the pieces of wood apart for us and hammered the old rusty nails out!  YAY!  

Aaron found some sand paper and a small saw at the local DAISO ($4.00 total) and went right to work on the rooftop of my apartment building, sanding and cutting the pieces of wood!
We love the character in this wood!

No rooftop project is complete without a beer, right?!  Aaron likes to keep it classy in a fancy wine glass!

 

This morning, I scoured the internet in search of home made wood stains, since I have NO idea where to buy any in Korea.  I found a website that said if you soak steel wool in a cup of vinegar for 24 hours, it can be used as a dark wood stain!  PERFECT!  So, I walked next door, to the corner market, and grabbed a package of steel wool... but then as I was walking to the checkout stand my eye was drawn to a small display of brown shoe polish... and the wheels started turning!  If it works on leather, it should be strong enough to work on wood, right?!  For $2.00, it was worth a shot!

I was right!  Not only did it work, but it stained it the perfect color!  SCORE!
The wood only needed one coat, which meant only 1 bottle was needed! 

The next part was something that made me a bit anxious!  If I messed up the writing, I'd have to start all over!!   I grabbed a piece of newspaper and free handed the font for each sign on a piece of newspaper, then set it in front of the wood to help as a size and orientation reference.


I used a white paint pen (bought from DAISO for $1.00) to write the fonts, and I'm soooo excited with how the signs turned out... if I don't say so myself!  For a total of $7.00, I was able to make 4 one of a kind wood signs for the wedding!  YAY!!!

Hope my wedding guests are up for playing a couple of my favorite games!