 Hi and welcome to the Alabama extension try something new and the new thing that we're going to try today is how to make signboards and message boards for your home, your classroom, even for your business. Now this is something that all of the family members can get to be a part of they can do all parts of the activity and have a lot of fun doing it. Now one of the super cool things about this video is that one of you, maybe two, may get a chance to take one of these boards home. So there's a link in the description. If you would click on that link and give us demographic information that helps us with our reporting and extension system. Now if you don't want to is okay. Please don't put your name. We just want to know just basic demographics about you and maybe before you live so that we can identify. If you want to be included in the list, we'll pick out of that first 50 who will get to take these with them. I'll mail them to you personally. Now let's get started. First thing in making these signboards is you want to have wood. Now it depends on the size of your sign. If you want a sign that's going to be six feet tall like this one, then you would want to make sure that you purchase wood. That is six feet tall. If you want a shorter sign like this one, this was four feet. You can purchase a wood and four feet pieces. Now the piece of wood that we're going to be using today, this actual piece right here is a piece of ship black that was 12 foot. It was a 12 foot piece that I cut into thirds. So I got three pieces off of that 12 foot piece. So a great way again to save money. Now to start, you want to make sure that you have your stencils. Now you can purchase your stencils, but I made my own stencils. And how would you do that using Microsoft Word or Publisher or even PowerPoint? Now, if you're unfamiliar with what that is, if you have kids, they know exactly what it is because they use those programs and apps in for their schools. So basically what I did was chose the word that I wanted to use, printed them out in big letters. This font, you can get as big as five to 600. It depends on the width of your board and height of your board. If your board is a lot smaller like this one, you might want to go with a 200 font or 300 font. Two things you can do. You can use a Xacto blade or a razor blade. If kids, please parents are to do this part, not you. So make sure that a parent is cutting these letters out. If you're going to use an Xacto blade or a razor blade. Now kids can help if they have a safe pair of scissors that they can use. And basically if you're going to use the scissors, let me just show you right quick how to do it. So what you would do is just kind of start right here and you cut your letters out, cut out the black part. And that's going to be the part that you're going to paint inside of to create your stencil. Okay, so now the next thing that we're going to do is go into the fun fun part of making your signboards. So what I have already gone ahead and done is painted this board green. Our sign is going to spell spring. Can you see that? It's going to spell spring. So I have painted it green and I have taken my letters just like I showed you and I've cut them out. And let me just show you a little bit of trick. We're just going to zoom in for just a second in order to get this to fit on the board and be nice and symmetrical. You want to make sure that it is equal distance from each side of the board. Okay, so try to make sure you get a ruler and just go in there and measure. And also in spacing your letters, you want to make sure they're pretty even in front of each other as you go through and space them out. All right, so I've already gone ahead and since we're going to spell out the word spring, I've gone ahead and taped my letters together and taped them to the board to keep them from moving around. The next part is the fun part and the nerve wrecking part, but it's going to be so much fun for you and the family. Basically, we're going to do a green background with purple. Isn't that pretty? Okay, so we're going to do green and purple. And so to start, basically what you want to do is go through and you're going to not get too much paint on your brush because you don't want it to run. And that's the purpose of using this foam brush and just kind of try to press down a little bit as you go through and paint. And sometimes I like to just kind of go against the grain like this and just go through. Oh, that is looking so pretty. Look at that purple. And you're just going to kind of brush that paint on just like this and go through and complete the paint. See, and you all the paint that I'm using is actually just your craft paint out of the store. If you're going to have this inside your home, you really don't have to worry about the weather. Being, of course, inside your home. But if you're going to put it on the porch, you want to make sure that you put an extra coat of maybe I'm going to show you in just a minute, which you can spray on top of this paint to make sure it stays weatherproof. But if it's just for inside the home or inside the school or classroom, your craft paint out of the store works just fine. So after I've gone through and done this, I like to just kind of go over it and smooth it out just a little bit. Just like that. So then just going to do the rest of the letters. So now you have it. We have painted our letters and filled it in and now this is like the, oh my goodness, let's see how this is going to turn out. Now you could let it dry for just a couple of minutes, but I wouldn't let it completely dry because sometimes your paper will stick to the board and that's okay too. If you want to feel a little bit more at ease about it. So you want to let it completely dry. That's fine. But I'm going to go ahead and lift up the paper and we're going to see how it turned out. There we go. Spraying is on the way. Then I'm going to lift up this inner part here and this inner part right here. You got a little tape that's stuck down. All right. And there we have it. Spraying. And you can make this any color, of course, any combination of colors. So to finish it off, I found a cute little piece of floor. Just a little scrap that was left over from a bunch. And so I'm just going to take it and you can either hot glue it to the board or I'm just going to use this heavy-duty stapler and staple to the board. All right. Hold your ears. There we go. And now our spring board is complete. There we go. Okay. So now we're going to wrap this up with another technique in making signboards. We're actually going to be using wallpaper. That's right. Wallpaper. So over here on my hello sign, I've actually used wallpaper to make this sign and I just covered it with wallpaper and used the same technique to paint the letters using the stencils and this is the result of it. So basically all you do is purchase the wallpaper that you would like for your background to have. This one I'm actually using a wood grain type of wallpaper, but you can buy any kind that will complement the sign that you're wanting to do. It is a peel and stick. So that is super easy. And basically you peel it, stick it onto the wood. And let me show you one little technique to get that wallpaper to really stick to that wood. You can get an old credit card or an old gift card and just really put some elbow in it and press down to get it to stick to the board just like that. You can do just the top or the sides or cover both sides of it. It's up to you. After that, you just take your stencils, place them on the board like this and go through and paint inside your stencils to create your sign. Now this particular one is actually wash. So this is a behavioral sign that I'm actually going to finish for someone and basically it just reinforces the behavior of washing your hands. So whoever receives this sign, I want you to go a step further. I want you to find a child, someone with little hands, that can take their little hand prints, put it into the paint and put their little hand prints on each end of this signboard. And I think that will make for such a great reminder for our families to wash their hands and to help prevent themselves from getting sick. So thank you so much for working with me today. I hope that you had a great time. Remember, if you want to be considered to receive one of these signs that we've made today, feel like that demographic form in our description and just provide us with some basic information to help us with our reporting. Thank you.