Homemade Wedding Signs

For my friend's wedding that I am decorating,

we needed a way to tell people what we wanted them to do

as they entered the venue, so I decided to make some sort of signs.

I had found a pair of pretty, ornate frames in a white washed, 

goldish color that I thought would work perfectly...

except they did not come with glass in them...thats OK,

I can work around that....especially since I paid a buck each.

I decided that I wanted one to say "sign the book"

and the other to say "find your seat".

I picked out some ivory cardstock and used the paper 

backing from the frame as a template to cut it to size.

Then I stenciled my words onto the paper...

but it was a little crooked, so I tried AGAIN,

and AGAIN, and AGAIN. They were all coming out crooked!

Enter the hubby...

My husband said, 

"Why don't you draw a faint pencil line where you want 

each word to be so you can line up your stencil on it...

then you can just erase it when you are done."

He's smart,I knew I married him for a reason...

And of course, the words were straight the last time...

or close enough that I'm not making them over...

except that I had left a couple smudges 

on the paper from my stencil...ugh.

Another mistake...sigh.

all the mistakes I make have me feeling like a crafting hack.

Then I had an idea, why not distress the paper to make it look antiqued, and those smudges will just look like age!

I got out my distressing ink and a pouncer sponge brush,

and brushed over the whole surface, concentrating 

on the imperfections and around the edges.

I stood back and admired them...I think they turned out beautiful, 

but I wanted to take advantage of the fact that they had 

no glass and make them three dimensional.

I found a tutorial on how to turn basic dollar store crepe 

paper into beautiful little flower rosettes.You can find it here.

I made up some rosettes according to the instructions, 

then glued them into the corners of my frames.

Sorry that I forgot to take pictures along the way...

{Sometimes when I don't know how something will turn out, I totally forget to take pictures.}

But, I do have a really nice "after" picture,

What do you think?