Pallet Letter Sign

I recently started seeing these circular letter signs on IG and thought I would give it a try. My dad works in a shop and is able to get pallets pretty easily. I asked him to pick up a pallet for me and I cut it apart with my Ryobi jig saw. Next, I used my Ryobi orbital sander and sanded down the boards a little bit, still leaving them with that rough pallet look. 

My next step was figuring out how to get all the boards into a perfect circle. I am still trying to master this. For this one, I laid out all the boards and then used my tape measure to measure out 10 inches from a dot I made in the center. This turned out to be a 20 inch sign. I marked this around the wood and used this as my guide to cut out the circle with my jig saw. 

After this, I printed out a very large S from Microsoft Word and used that as my stencil for the letter. It significantly helped to have all my boards numbered, I would highly recommend doing this with a light pencil mark. Next, I was trying think of how I should assemble the boards to stay together. My boyfriend introduced me to a dowel jig when he built this Restoration Hardware knockoff media console. Here are some pictures of this amazing piece he did for his living room.

So I decided to use dowels to connect these boards together with this dowel jig. If I were to make more of these signs, next time I would cut a thin piece of plywood and use my nail gun to secure these. It was a lot of work with the dowel jig. I then used a wood file to smooth out some of the edges. Here it is after I got it all assembled.

Next, I used some Minwax dark walnut stain to get a nice dark wood look for the sign. 

 

I actually really liked it with just the stain on it as well. But, I decided to go white with it. White has been my obsession lately! I used Fusion mineral paint in limestone to paint it and then some light sanding to distress it. I love how it turned out and currently have it displayed in my bedroom.

What do you all think?

Thanks for reading!
Shayla

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