Frugal Friday: Noel Canvas Sign

This week’s holiday craft was so super easy it makes me wonder why I didn’t do it before now. I had four canvases that I painted years ago (I think for my first apartment, so 10 years ago?) when dress pictures were super popular. I can’t draw a lot of things, but I can draw dresses so I created these paintings to match my bedroom decor at the time. Fast forward to now and I’d had these pictures sitting in the guest bedroom and I couldn’t decide what to do with them. On the one hand, they didn’t really match my decor anymore or what I want to do in the guest room one day, but I didn’t really want to toss them either.

Instead, I decided to re-purpose the canvases for some Christmas word art in the dining room.

Step 1: Choose your word

Knowing I had four canvases, I had to keep my word to four letters – so that basically left me with Noel and Snow. The First Noel is one of my favorite Christmas carols and I love all things French, so I went with that one.

Step 3: Repaint the canvases

Like most good crafters, I have a stock of craft paint on hand. I decided to go with a basic red and a pearl white for the base colors. I know that the dining room Christmas table setting is going to be read and silver and wanted to continue this color scheme.  Lesson learned: I should’ve primed these before painting. It took quite a few coats to cover the old painting, and really if you look closely at the finished product, you can still see a little bit peeking  through on the white ones.

Step 3: Stencils 

I bought these stencils on a recent trip to Michael’s with this project in mind. I cut them apart and taped them to each sign using painter’s tape. From there, I used a silver paint pen to color in the letters. Super easy! I prefer to use a paint pen or sharpie for stenciling instead of a paint and brush because the lines are much crisper. It took me all of 10 minutes to do this part.

The longest part of this project was waiting for the paint to dry in between coats. If I’d been really in a hurry, I would’ve dried them with my hair dryer to speed up the process. I used to use this trick quite a lot in college when I was doing lots of sorority crafting! I have zero patience when it comes to waiting for paint to dry and have ruined my fair share of projects this way.

I decided to place these on top of the wine rack in the dining room and I’m loving the look! This was so easy to make and a very cost effective way to have something new I can use for the next few years! The only materials I purchased were the stencils – everything else I already had on hand.