Wedding Present - Family Name Sign

My wife’s uncle was married over the weekend and as our gift to them I was asked to make what I refer to as the “Pinterest Family Name Sign” - to the rescue!

Medium Maple Plywood on pallet wood (with Walnut stain). They were very happy with it! May have picked up a few commissions from other people that saw it as well!

The most daunting part was gluing each of the little letters and keeping them spaced/aligned properly, and we were under the gun to have it finished by a certain time as well so I needed to make sure everything was in place with enough time to dry before we gave it to them. Thankfully Gorilla wood glue sets up in as little as 30 minutes. Used a speed square and steel ruler to help align and space everything. I’d originally wanted to add a sawtooth hanger to the back but just ran out of time.

Really, the part that took the most time was cutting, assembling and staining the pallet wood backer for the letters. The cut all of this out in less than 10 minutes and I was able to get everything glued on in about 45 minutes with a little time between each section to let the glue cure a bit. In the middle of the glue-up I started wondering how feasible this would be as a purchasable product. Getting the last name aligned and glued down wasn’t too bad since it was all one piece, but when it was time to move on to the arrows, heart and letters (especially those little periods #tweezers), I wasn’t completely sure of the best strategy to take. After having finished this one though, I think I worked out a technique that should make for faster production of any of these in the future. We’ll see!