How to Make an Outdoor Wooden Porch Sign with Vinyl Decal and Your Cricut Machine

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Here is a quick sign you can make for your porch with a Cricut and adhesive vinyl. When a coworker found this cute quote, I knew I needed to display it somewhere on our sun porch. I got a wooden sign, applied the vinyl to it and hung it up. Now I can enjoy it whenever I sit out there.

I used removable vinyl for this project because I liked the blue-green color and did not have it in permanent. I would recommend permanent vinyl for this type of project, although the removable has held up just fine on this sign.

Our Summer Fiesta Bundle has some bright colors that would work great for this, or you could go with the Rainbow Colors Bundle. Spring and summer seem to cry out for vibrant colors. You could even use several different colors for the design. I actually chose the color for my sign to complement the paint on my porch.

Materials:

Cricut machine
Standard Grip Cutting Mat
Permanent adhesive vinyl (can use Removable)
Transfer tape
Cricut Basic Tool Set
Wooden sign

Once I uploaded my design into Design Space, I sized it to fit my sign. The image was square, but the sign was rectangular, so I unlocked the dimensions and changed them individually to get the quote to fit on my sign as desired. This did distort the image somewhat, but I was okay with the end result.

I placed the vinyl on a green Standard Grip cutting mat and loaded it into my machine for cutting.

I checked the fit of the design by placing it inside the sign. I would use a less sticky transfer tape to help protect the finish of the wood during application.

I weeded my design, using a Cricut weeder tool and a pin pen for the tiny bits of vinyl inside the smaller letters.

I applied transfer tape onto the design, burnished it on both sides, and carefully removed the vinyl from the backing.

I was concerned about the transfer tape marring the wood, so I tried to only burnish over the letters to avoid blank areas as much as possible.

When I pulled off the transfer tape, some of the paint finish did adhere to the tape, as you can see below.

Here is the sign showing a couple of those spots. It wasn't too bad, and I didn't think anyone would really notice that much.

Tip: Always pay attention to the type of finish your sign or blank has, so you can take steps to try to avoid this as much as possible. Since the finish on my sign had a somewhat distressed look already, I was fine with how it turned out.

That's it! I hung up my new sign on my porch, where I can look at it when I'm out there enjoying the nice weather. It makes me smile every time I look at it. Sometimes we need a reminder to take time to relax a bit and not feel guilty about it.