Women's Expo signs

For Tammy's expos we needed better signage.  One of her friends had two large used "A frame" signs from an auctioneer who retired and quit the business.  We painted over those signs and fixed them up a bit.  Then from my scrap wood pile I found enough wood to make three more large "A frame" signs.

Tammy is having a women's expo this Saturday in Columbia Falls, MT and we've been spending this past week making and painting these signs in amongst all of our other activities this week.

Here Tammy is painting some of the signs I had made.

Tammy bought cardboard stencils for the lettering.  The stencils had white spaces in the letters.  I was not a fan of the white spaces.  I didn't mind them in letters like "E" or "P" or "O".   The white spaces in the letters: "W", "M", "N", "S", and "X" bothered me as they didn't look right.  For W, M and N, the letters were made up of three black pieces that formed the letter.  To me it took another millisecond to mentally form the letter from the three black pieces.  This is not what one wants when a person is driving by fast in the vehicle.   The X just looks wrong to me.  And the white space in the S made me think of a $.

Tammy was against me filling in the white spaces in the letters as "they were supposed to be like that".  Just because something was "supposed to be like that" doesn't make it right or good.  I went ahead and filled in the spaces on one sign to show her how the letters would look when filled in.  I included (partial) before and an after photos of the letters.  I wish I would have thought to take the photo before I fixed the word "women's" as you'd really agree with me then.

All the signs now have their white spaces filled in.

Because the stencils were cardboard, slapping paint over the cardboard was not an option as the edges would bleed and the finished letters would become crooked.  While I suggested outlining the letters with a permanent marker to get sharp straight edges and then painting each letter, Tammy wanted to fill in all of the letters with permanent marker.  I even asked Tammy to outline a few signs and I would paint those signs while she marked in the other signs but she was determined all the signs would be filled in with permanent markers.  Naturally this took longer to do and we didn't finish the signs until late tonight.

We have four signs done.  I had to paint over part of one sign as Tammy marked "WOMEN" and not "WOMEN'S".   I had to paint two coats to cover the black words and the second coat of paint is not completely dry.  I think we can live with four signs tomorrow.


Here is how the finished sign looks.  I took a big piece of cardboard I had and created a stencil for an arrow.