Firewood turned DIY wall art

Today I wanted to do a recap of a recent DIY wall art project I shared on my friend, Gail’s, blog at My Repurposed Life. Gail is a sweetheart and fellow DIYer that I met at Haven two years ago. She’s recovering from surgery and needs some good, old-fashioned rest and relaxation right now.

It all started with this hunk of board I discovered on our firewood pile a few weeks ago.

My husband said he found it under a pile of leaves and assumed it was junk. Silly husband. 😉

It didn’t seem to be too warped, so I rescued it. I trimmed the top and bottom on the miter saw to make the length 30 1/2 inches. (I kept the width at 11 1/2 inches and the depth at about 3/4 of an inch.)

I sanded all four sides and the edges and corners with my orbital sander. Then I brushed on a coat of Minwax stain in Jacobean.

While the stain was drying, I created some word art I wanted to stick on the front of it. I used Adobe Photoshop to piece together a collage of words using various fonts. (I’m sure you could create something similar using PicMonkey or Gimp.)

I made the image size 20 inches wide by 30 inches long – the largest poster size available through the Walmart photo lab (for same-day pickup). Because my wood piece was only 11 1/2 inches wide, I made sure the word art was no wider than 11 inches. (You’ll see why later.)

I’m sure I got a few strange looks from the Walmart photo lab employees considering I had chunks of white space on both sides of my poster. But I just carefully trimmed them off at home.

Next I mounted the word art onto my stained board using Mod Podge (matte finish). This is the part where I held my breath, because it looked like I was ruining everything!

I applied Mod Podge to the entire top of the photo, too. Luckily, it dried clear. I did make sure to use even strokes with my paintbrush so the texture of the glue was not too visible.

To hang the piece on the wall, I used Command™ Large Picture Hanging Strips.

Here’s the final result:

You’ll notice I left about a quarter inch of the board visible on all four sides in front. I felt this gave it a more finished look. I love that you can see the wood grain on the sides.

So there you have it … a rescued piece of firewood transformed into an inspirational family mission statement.

Have you rescued any wood lately?

I’m linking this up to Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z, Fluster Buster and Not Just a Housewife.