Irish blessing board

I'm so thrilled with my latest project and can't wait to share it, so here we go....

It turned out super cute.

After doing my "lucky" blocks, I really wanted to do another St. Patrick's day project. I had some wood in my garage that I had gotten for a project, but oops, I got the wrong size. I pulled the wood out and used my first power tool on it....a belt sander. That was SO fun!! I used a 40 grit sand paper to just get the rough splintered edges off and smooth it down some. NOTE: this didn't make the board smooth, it just made it so it wasn't going to give me splinters. I made sure to take a damp cloth and wipe off all the dust.

Before

After...MUCH better. 

The next step was one of my favorite...I got to paint the wood the beautiful "shamrock" green that I used for the "lucky" blocks. Beautiful.

Now, came the hard part...figuring out what I wanted to board to say. After much searching and narrowing down, I finally decided on the cute Irish blessing that I used. It was short and made me think of St. Patrick's day. I used my awesome Silhouette to cut out white vinyl for all the words. I then put them on the board. Ya, they aren't perfectly straight, but oh well.

I was super excited for the next step...putting the word 'gold' on. I cut the word gold out of the white vinyl and used the outline as a stencil. I took extra special care to make sure it was attached to the board in every little crevice so that paint couldn't leak past.

I made sure to only put a little bit of paint on at a time. I made sure the layer was completely dry before applying another layer. I think I did 4 layers of the gold. I wanted to make sure that there was no green showing through. 

After one coat.

Yay! No leakage! 

Oh, this next step frustrated me so much...but it should be much easier for you. The word rainbow.
I tried rainbow scrapbook paper...that didn't really work. I bought printable stickers with the hope that I could make a rainbow pattern on them...only to learn if I want to design my own, I need photo editing software, which I can't locate at the moment (it got lost in our move 2 years ago). I bought card stock with an adhesive back...eh, it didn't work great, but I made do...because I was NOT going to go to the store again.

I ended up having to glue the letters down with Mod Podge...and then had to paint the whole board with Mod Podge because you can totally tell if only part of the board is painted.

After that was dry I added two coats of polyurethane to make sure it was good and sealed.

Oh Blogger...why do you constantly turn my photos. 

It turned out SUPER cute!

Resting in it's home. I'm excited to get my door in the St. Patrick's day spirit. 

 On a happy side note, my kids are loving this Irish blessing. They are going around the house singing it. haha.

*Note, I didn't find the Irish blessing on a certain site. It was on many sites and seems to be an old Irish blessings and the origins are unknown to me.