If you’re at all like me, you’d rather give a personal gift you made than go shopping in the mall. I wanted to give my son Blake a special piece of wall art made in my workshop, so I started by securing four lengths of pallet boards with strips of wood on the back, then used a stencil to outline his initial on the top.
Cutting out the letter with my sabre saw weakened the four boards, so I carefully turned it over and attached three more boards between the two outside strips holding the four boards together. As you will next see, portions of these backer boards will be visible through the cutout letter “B.”
Artwork always looks better framed, so I created a two-part frame using scraps of pallet boards. First I glued and nailed four 2-inch strips flat against the original four front boards.
Next I cut four narrow strips to fit around the perimeter of the frame. In addition to simply looking good, these four framing strips hide the exposed edges of the front and back boards.
A light sanding smoothed out any roughness and softened the cut edges left by my saw blade.
As a final step, two coats of clear Minwax® Polycrylic Protective Finish sealed the wood and brought out the various natural colors of the pallet boards.
And even just temporarily propped up on a bench, Blake’s pallet wall art looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. And with the wood from a free pallet and the stencil leftover from an earlier project, the price made it look even that much better!
Until next time,
Thanks for stopping by!
Bruce
