My Wedding DIYs: Marquee Sign

can you tell where my blog color scheme was inspired from? :)

I mentioned in this post about my table numbers, how important I felt it was (for my own sanity) to make a list of priority wedding DIY projects and sticking to it.

 

Well, this project was the Hail Mary (look at me using football references, Luke and my mom would be so proud) of my wedding project DIYs. I totally broke my own rule and threw it into the mix unplanned and pretty down to the wire of our wedding.

 

Here's the longwinded and very wordy story:

(If you are solely interested in the DIY itself, I suggest you scroll down about 3 feet...)

 

One Friday night, flipping through magazines (just living it up per usual), I came across this absolutely adorable nursery. (Fun fact- it belongs to former Bachelorette contestant, Molly Mesnick and was designed with a lot of help from her friend and co-former-Bachelorette-contestant, Jillian Harris. I leave all the Bachelorette/Bachelor-watching to my friend, Traci, but I was swooning over the nursery they created.

 

 

I'll definitely be tucking away (aka pinning) this inspiration photo for my far-distant (ok, maybe not that far but let's just say that so I don't have a mild panic attack) future nursery. I love the chevron wall and the cute use of the Nate Berkus for Target tortoise shell* in the gallery wall.

 

*I've picked up and put down that tortoise shell so many times at Target. I just couldn't figure out a spot for it in our house... maybe when I'm allowed to shop again, I'll snag it.

 

I also love the gray, which would be perfect if you weren't planning to find out the gender of your baby. You could simply add in bright splashes of gender-appropriate colors once the baby arrived. Anyways, I severely digress, I promise this is a wedding DIY post!

 

While the entire nursery is working for me, the actual element that time-appropriately grabbed me on that fateful magazine-filled Friday night (I'm an animal) was the "M" marquee sign, AND the fact that it was DIY'ed no less!

 

This was the moment I replaced my entire weekend's long list of planned wedding project to-do's with one-- a DIY marquee sign. I spent the rest of the evening googling various DIY methods and decided on using a few combined methods.

 

DIY Marquee Sign

 

 Materials

• Foam Board
• Oak Tag
• Clear Globe Lights
• Hot Glue and Hot Glue Gun
• Scissors
• Ideally a box cutter and Exacto knife of some sort, though I admittedly unsafely used an old steak knife (not recommended!)
• Spraypaint

I more or less followed this tutorial, but I'll briefly describe my less orderly (more realistic/not a DIY-superstar) process. It's helpful to look at pictures of the process too, which I didn't take while I was too busy trying not to cut myself with my steak knife.

 

I decided to make a C, &, and L so I started by cutting my foam board into rectangles of all the same dimensions. I didn't print out a template of the letters, I just sketched the letters onto the foam board sticking right to the edges so they would end up being the same size. The ampersand was too tricky to draw freehand. I typed out a giant ampersand in the dimensions of my foam board, cropped it into sizes that would print on an 8x10 sheet of paper, printed on a few sheets of paper, cut it out, and taped the template together.

 

Once I unsafely cut out my letters from the foam board (honestly, use an Exacto knife a steak knife was just not ideal and make very jagged cuts as you can imagine), I began cutting out strips of oak tag to create the 3D-ness of the marquee sign. I cut the oak tag lengthwise into 5.5" strips and then go to work gluing them around the edges of the foam board letters. Make sure to really crease the oak tag before gluing around corners, so that you get nice sharp edges (like on the "L"  below).

 

I put my oak tag strips right to the edge of the foam board, but I should have put them about 2/3 of the way, like the Oh Happy Day tutorial did. They also used tape to attach the oak tag to the foam board, I used hot glue, and in hindsight the tape would have been the way to go. The hot glue looked a little messy in the end result, but oh well!

 

Next, I took the circle template from the stringed light's box and used it to draw circles on the foam board where the lights would stick into. I used 2 sets of lights so I knew I could only have roughly 8 lights per letter. I sketched the placement of the lights before cutting out the wholes to make sure it looked okay.

 

Once I finished cutting out the wholes, I took all the letters outside and sprayed them* with my trusty gold spray paint. It didn't take very long for them to dry, thank goodness for my own impatience, since it was just paper. *Make sure, if you do use hot glue, to pull away all the little strings. They look really noticeable after you spray paint them, which I learned a little too late.

 

The last step was sticking my lights into each hole (unscrew the bulb and reconnect it through each hole). Once I finished, I set up my sign on my counter, stepped back and marveled at my creation. 

 

 

 I left the placement of  it at our wedding up to the wedding coordinator. It was in the perfect spot in front of the cake table on the dance floor, casting a pretty glow on the dance floor all night.

 

 

 

 

It did need some readjustment though, no doubt due to the raucous dancing. Thanks, Travis!

 

 

 

 

And though it was definitely not perfect, I loved the way it came out. I'm happy that I broke my own rule and it added it to my list last-minute, thus calling for an amendment:

 

Create your priority DIY to do list early on in your wedding planning and stick to it, with the exception of one Hail Mary project.