Hi there and welcome to Farbulous
Creations! I’m Ron Farber-Newman and today we’re going to go back in
time a bit. I haven’t got a Delorean, but I do have a drive full of various
project footage going back a few years. You see, even though this video is
getting produced and edited in 2019, without any regularity over the past few
years, I would occasionally film myself working on a project figuring, “hey, this
might make a cool video someday.” Now that I’ve actually started my channel, I figured
that hard drive deserved a looking through, and I found what seems to be the entire process of
me creating a custom wedding name sign as a gift for my cousin Emily and her now-husband Alex back
in September of 2017. Let’s take a look, shall we? Alex and Emily were having a barn wedding
in a semi-rural part of the midwest, so I thought it would be an interesting
challenge to design for their theme, which I got a sneak peak of through their
invitation. They used one of those sort of Pinterest-y script fonts for primary lettering
and a typical serif font for the secondary text. While I really like “rustic chic” decor, it’s
not something that I had really done before, so as you’ll see, I went through
quite a few design iterations. When making wedding signs, I typically like
to make the last name the most prominent part, with the first names above and the date of
the wedding below. But this project posed a challenge that I hadn’t really run into before,
and that was the shortness of their last name: Lane. Just four letters. It may not be immediately
clear why a short name poses a design challenge, but you’ll see that you can only scale the last
name so big before it just looks awkwardly sized compared to everything else. It has a lot to do
with the aspect ratio of the word when typed out; the shorter the name, the closer to square the
name is, meaning that as you make the word wider, it gets taller at a much faster rate than a longer
name would. I played with kerning a bit and tried a few fonts that were just in-general wider,
but I wasn’t happy with either of those options. The solution for short last names, as
it turns out, was to not make the last name the most prominent focal point, but
instead the couple’s first names. The last name was still there, but delegated
to the spot above the first names. Since it no longer read fluidly from top to
bottom, I thought prepending the word “The” to the front of the last name worked well
to highlight the last name in its own way. As I’m designing signs like this, I like to plop
in temporary colors for what I imagine the final colors will look like in the finished sign to
help me get a better sense of where the design is at. I was also really eager to do something
interesting with the shape of the sign itself. I had designed a handful of signs at this point that
were pretty formal in their outer shape – inset scooped corners, fancy border radiuses, etc
– and since this was meant to be more rustic, I thought I would explore a more informal
approach to the sign’s overall shape. It took me a bit to get there, but being that this
was meant to be inspired by rustic barnwood chic, I decided to try a staggered “plank”
or “floorboard” approach, as though the backing piece was made up of multiple “boards,”
even if it wasn’t. After shuffling the “boards” around until they were perfectly random, I
started to second guess the typeface I had selected for the primary lettering, mostly
because it had a few too many flourishes for my tastes and I wanted to tone that aspect
of it down. I tried a few different fonts, but none of them were quite as good as the one
I’d already chosen, so I decided to tackle the problem head on and modify the letters that
I didn’t like. It was primarily the “E” in Emily and the “A” in Alex that I didn’t like,
so I went through and removed the extra accents that made the letters “too busy” for me. I had
also started adding an apostrophe to “The Lanes” until a quick Google search revealed that was
improper grammar. Whoops, that was a close one. Once I was fully happy with the design, it
was time to prep it for the laser cutter. The laser cutter I use at the maker space I attend
is an old Full Spectrum laser and the software is a bit finicky, so proper setup of my file is
key. Over the years I’ve learned that shapes can’t have fills and strokes or it will double
up the toolpaths and cut everything twice. The same thing happens if the stroke weight in
Illustrator is wider than 0.25pt in width. I like to break my design up into multiple
layers so when “printing” from my layered PDF I can choose which layers I want on at a
given time; changing the colors of the stroke for each layer also gives me the ability to have
different cut settings for each set of toolpaths. For the dividing lines in between the adjoining
planks, I created these from the rectangles themselves before merging a copy of them into
one solid chunk. This way the outer backing board could be cut out together, and then the lines
could be etched on top to give the appearance of separate pieces of wood. With my file mostly
prepped, I was ready to prep my materials. Since the goal of the backing board
was to look rustic like barn wood, the challenge was to make that
happen without actually having any real legit barnwood at my disposal.
I would have to make faux barnwood. I took a few pieces of pine cut to approximate
size and with a wire brush in my drill, took to the boards to heavily distress them. I also
beat them up a bit with the back of my hammer, and then smoothed out the dents a bit with the
wire brush. The wire brush was really key here, as it effectively allowed me to sand in
between the lines of the grain that made up the earlywood and latewood in the board. This
would happen naturally over time in real barnwood, as earlywood is softer and more prone to wear; if
you’ve ever encountered an old weathered board, it more than likely had this rigid bumpy
grain that you could feel with your hand. With the board properly textured, it was time
to give it the right color too. I’d researched a handful of ways in which you could faux-age
wood, but a common theme was iron acetate, which may sound fancy but it's just steel
wool dissolved in vinegar. Unfortunately I didn’t record myself making it, but I store
my solution in a mason jar, and it smells exactly like you think it would: rusty pickles.
There’s a free band name for whoever wants it. There’s a chemical reaction that people smarter
than me can explain better than me, but the way I understand it, the tannins in the wood
react with this iron acetate to darken and grey the wood. Certain woods have a really high
tannin content, such as oak, while other woods, like pine, have a lower tannin content. For this
project, I needed to use pine though, which I’ll explain why later, but thankfully there’s a way
to help supplement the pine’s lackluster tannin content with a simple cup of piping hot strong
black tea. Tea is loaded with the stuff – tannins that is – and so before applying the iron
acetate, a healthy coat of tea is applied first. After the tea had soaked in and dried, it
was time for the magic of the iron acetate and tannins to do their work. What goes
on relatively lightly is transformed to a dark pigment literally before your eyes and
is really quite neat to watch. It also gets a bit darker as it completes its reaction and
dries, so don’t fret if it’s not super dark right away. In my case, I felt it was too
dark after drying, so I decided to “sand” it back a little bit with a brillo pad. This
took off a good amount of the finish without being so aggressive that it exposed the
bare wood underneath like sandpaper would. In my design file, I originally imagined the
secondary lettering – their last name and wedding date – to be black, but I was aware
that it might be too dark to read easily or clearly so I did a test cut with bare wood
and another test cut with dark stained wood. The dark stained wood just didn’t have the
contrast I wanted so I decided to use the lighter stuff. But since I was also using light
colored wood for the primary lettering – their first names – I didn’t want it to be identical
in color, so I used a light colored stain to help give the birch plywood a Colonial
Maple golden hue for just a slight bit of contrast. Here’s the unfinished birch and
the stained piece side-by-side for comparison. I didn’t show it in my design process, but I
will often gather and rearrange the various letters to optimize the space on a piece
of wood as to minimize the scrap. Here you can see the ampersand getting nice
and cozy with the Alex and Emily pieces. Most pieces coming out of the laser need a bit
of sanding to remove the smoke that settles on the surface of the wood near the cuts. This
can be reduced by good air assist blowing at the wood as it cuts and by good ventilation
to suck the smoke out of the laser cutter. But it will always happen a little bit
and it’s nothing a good sanding can’t fix. Large sheets of sandpaper help for this.
I will occasionally leave a faint hint of the smoke visible to kind of let the finished piece
“own its origin” so to speak. After confirming the lettering looked good on the prepared
backing board, it was time to cut that next. So I mentioned earlier that it was important to
be able to use pine for the backing board. Let me explain why. Most laser cutters can only cut wood
that’s around a 1/4 inch or thinner, even more so for hardwoods. There just isn’t enough energy to
cut past that amount of thickness very cleanly. Well I wanted this sign to have a little heft so I
used a 3/4 inch piece of pine. In past experiments I discovered that pine was exempt from that 1/4
inch guideline since it was so soft… the laser could essentially cut it like butter. But there
was a little trick I used to make the cut cleaner. Laser light is a super focused light beam, but
because it’s super focused, the range where the light energy is at its peak power is pretty
tight, especially in a laser cutter where the light is bounced around on a handful of mirrors
and then finally refocused before making its way to the wood. As a result, if you could see it
with your naked eye, the beam forms sort of an hourglass shape, essentially two cones stacked
on top of each other. Where those two cones meet in the middle is where the light is most
focused and you get the cleanest cuts. But the areas immediately above and below the cone still
have quite a bit of energy, just not as much. So with that little lesson of laser light in
mind, normally when you’re cutting a piece of 1/8 inch or 1/4 inch wood, for example,
you would focus the laser on the surface of the wood to get the sharpest line possible.
But since this 3/4 inch piece of pine was quite a bit thicker than normal cutting
thickness, I learned to focus the laser in the middle of the board. I did this by
focusing on the surface of the wood first, and then raising the cut bed by 3/8 of an inch
– which is exactly half the thickness of my board – so that the tightest focus of energy
would be at the center, therefore splitting the difference of “dissipated” energy to be a
little bit on both the top and bottom of my board. I should note that I also used the slight
“defocusing” technique to laser the lines in between the boards – by having the laser out
of focus and turning the power down pretty low, I was able to get a nice thick dark line
that scorched the top of the wood instead of what would have otherwise been a
thin tiny cut line in the surface. After the outline was cut, I
very lightly lasered a copy of the primary and secondary text paths
on top of the board to serve as guides for myself when gluing to ensure
everything was perfectly spaced. When it comes to thick cuts like this, it’s not
always clear right away if the laser made it all the way through or if another pass is needed to
finish the cut. In these cases, I’m always careful to hold the piece firmly in place as I make sure
the scrap comes loose of it. This way I don’t accidentally move the design should it need to be
in the same spot for another pass. In this case, it was all good so I was able to remove
the cut backing board and inspect my work. The final pieces to cut were my
golden-stained secondary lettering, which I had also prepped to
optimize space on my wood. Now it was time for final assembly so I could
see it in its final form! I put a good blob of glue down and used it to sort of “finger-paint”
the glue onto the small individual letters and numbers and pressed firmly until it no longer
wanted to slide away on me. After I did five or so letters in a row, I used a steel plate
to “clamp” things down while I worked on the next series of letters. This is a pretty slow
process, but it’s also semi-meditative. There aren’t many moments in woodworking that are
safe to let your mind wander and think about other things, but slow-going repetitive
glue ups are definitely one of them. For the primary lettering, it was
a large enough surface area that I decided to employ the help of a
small paintbrush to apply the glue. I decided to forgo any topcoat to compliment
the rustic nature of the design, so after all the glue was dried it was time to apply mounting
hardware. I prefer picture hanging wire most of the time as I find it’s easier for the recipient
to get it on the wall and get it level. I also add adhesive felt pads to balance the vertical
tilt that the wire adds and to prevent their wall from getting scuffed underneath the sign.
You’ll also see here my original naming idea for these woodworking projects and eventual
YouTube channel of mine. But Farbermade just didn’t have the ring I wanted hence my shift
to Farbulous Creations. So just imagine this says Farbulous Creations. There perfect. Alex and
Emily, if I ever get stickers made I’ll send you one so you can put it over the etched logo on
the back that literally no one will ever see. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any glamorous
footage of the finished sign hanging up, but I did take some really
nice photos for my portfolio, so the big reveal here will be a
bit old-school Powerpoint style. And here she is! I was really, really happy with
how this turned out! It had all the character and charm I was going for while not being so rustic
that it would look out of place in a modern home. All that was left at this point was
wrapping it up in bubble wrap and kraft paper and delivering it to the new Mr.
and Mrs. Lane. It was a beautiful wedding, and I was honored to take
part in their special day. Well guys, I hope you enjoyed that in-depth look
at the process behind making a custom name sign like that. I put a lot of heart into every one I
make, so hopefully that shows in my process. These are the types of projects I love to do and I can’t
wait to share more of them with you in the future. If you liked this video I sure would appreciate
it if you gave me a thumbs up and subscribed to my channel; it’ll let me know that this is the type
of video that people like watching and encourage me to make more like it in the future! And if
you do want to see more like this in the future, be sure to hit the bell icon too, so YouTube
notifies you the next time I release a video. Thank you so much for watching, I really
appreciate it, and until next time, cheers!
