I’d like to introduce you to more of my family. Meet Nutsy, she’s our alpha hen. She gets broody on occasion and acts like a spaz, but really, who doesn’t? She likes cabbage, wild bird seed and long walks in the bushes.
We have six hens total and they do a great job keeping us in plenty of eggs. So much so that my husband decided to start selling them. He asked me to make him a sign to put out at the road. I thought he wanted one that looked like other people’s from around here, just a plywood sandwich board with what looks like a kindergartner wrote “Fresh Eggs” on it with, of course, a few letters backwards.
He would ask me every once in a while why I hadn’t started on the sign yet. I finally told him I would do it the next day and that it would only take a couple minutes to write it out. He told me that he didn’t want to hang a sign that looked like that.
Wait a minute, what? He wanted to hang it? And he didn’t know why I class up other things, but not his sign. Whoa! Hold on there!
I had no idea he was wanting a nice sign. Communication is not my strong suit. I started asking him what all he was wanting on the sign and got to work drawing up a few ideas for him to choose from. He pulled a bit from one drawing and a bit from another and then explained what colors and look he was after.
This is what I came up with for him.
Is that my finger in the picture? I am so taking after my Grandpa Chamberlain.
Anyways, I painted a 1/2 inch plywood board white and traced the picture onto it with carbon paper.
He wanted the sign to be done in browns and look a bit weathered. So the first step was to paint the letters and the hen. Then I took a black paint pen and traced around them so they would have a cleaner more defined edge.
Next came the weathering. I started by painting lines with a medium gray to look like the edges of boards. I didn’t do a very heavy line. I wanted it to look like they had been painted and cracked apart a bit.
Then using the same gray I did a dry brushing over top to look like the boards have been there soaking up the sun and rain for a while.
This is how it looked after painting, but before getting trimmed down to size.
After the frame was stained and attached it was my husband’s job to hang it. A couple of pressure treated 4 x 4s and some eye bolts and there it is! I make it sound like his job took two seconds, but I wasn’t the one doing it, so it feels like it was only two.
While it’s no ugly sandwich board it seems to be doing a good job. I’ve already sold a dozen eggs!
Nutsy couldn’t be happier. Just look at that beautiful smile!
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