The Serendipity House - A shaped sign tutorial

This post is a tutorial about a sign I made for Cindy who blogs at Cottage Instincts and sells her painted furniture at The Serendipity House .  I offered to make Cindy a sign, just because.

Cindy's business has a really nice logo that she put together with an interestingly shaped graphic from The Graphics Fairy.  I thought it would look nice cut out of wood.

The first step was printing out her logo, which I got directly from her website and enlarged to about 22" long. I printed it out in black and grey on two pieces of legal sized paper.

 

After cutting it out and taping it together, I then found a nice solid piece of pine (oh dear, can't remember the thickness, I think just under 1") and drew the middle section accurately and a rough outline of the outer curvy parts.

I decided that this logo sign would look great if the middle section, with the wording, was raised up from the background.  I thought flat would be a bit, well, boring.

Now, this added much more work to my sign than a flat sign would be, but anyway, away I went with my small router.  Using a straight bit I began to take away wood from the outer edges, where all the fancy design is.

With a router, it's best to work at this gradually, taking about 1/8" depth off on the first pass:

Subsequent passes go deeper and deeper.  This is time consuming, but necessary:

Here you can see the right portion is deeper than the left:

This is a photo of the whole thing routed away.  Unfortunately I don't really know how much I took off, and I've already sent the sign, so... I just took it down to where I thought it looked good:

Here's a close-up where you can see the different heights. Again, the middle part was not touched: 

Now, if I had a good quality scroll saw, I would have used it, but since I don't I was stuck using a jigsaw.  I drew the final outside shape on the BACK of the sign, being sure to line up properly where the design was on the front:

I cut on the back, since it was flat and the jigsaw could run on the even wood.  This is after turning it over to get a peek at how things were going:

Here's the design all cut out, including holes where they appear in the original design:

I used a wood stain and stained darker on the outer portion than the middle:

Here's a close-up: 

After the stain dried I used carbon paper to trace the lettering and birdie for the logo.  Then I hand painted it with standard craft paint.

So, this shows the website logo and below, the wood sign I made:

I hope Cindy likes it, she will be hanging it in her brand new home.

Can I make one for you with your logo?

Showing at the following parties:
No Minimalist Here
My Repurposed Life
French Country Cottage
Jennifer Rizzo
Funky Junk Interiors
too much time on my hands
Elizabeth & Co.
Coastal Charm