The first sign I made for outside my shop ended up getting damaged in a storm, so I decided to make another. I went with a smaller, more ornate overall design this time, and decided to go with a solid white oak sign for this one.

After designing a revised logo in Photoshop, I printed it to scale and taped it on top of the white oak blank. Then I used a marking knife to trace all the lettering.

After all the tracing was done, I removed the remainder of the logo printout. Then I used a trim router to carve out the letter areas so they were slightly recessed from the main face of the sign.

After finishing with the router work, I painted the entire sign white, and then painted the raised areas a dark green. This photo was taken midway through the painting when it was still a bit patchy, and it didn’t have the outer edge color on yet.

For the sign post itself, I used a cedar 4x4 for the upright, and then carved out a mortise to slide the 2x4 cedar arm through. After that, I pinned the joint with two red oak dowels and rounded over the cut edges. The arm is also secured using the decorative wrought iron bar on top. The cedar post was treated with a preservative for the portion that was underground, and above ground it was sealed with a spar urethane. It was set into a small garden of ornamental grasses to protect it from the lawnmower.

A finished picture of the sign out at the front of our property.