Driftwood Signs DIY And Inspiration

Driftwood is a perfect type of wood to make signs with. Most driftwood is nice and smooth which makes an excellent base for painting or other finishing. Plus, the unique shapes of driftwood make them very interesting to look at. These DIY driftwood signs are a great inspiration for creating your own sign.

How To Make Driftwood Signs

Decorating with driftwood gives such a clean rustic look and fits in with many styles of decor. You can’t go wrong making a driftwood sign to give as a gift or keep for yourself.

Personalized Burlap Signs

One idea for driftwood signs is to decoupage burlap to the wood. This particular project didn’t start out as a hanging sign DIY. Instead, I was just going to make burlap labels to stick on a few gift packages. I had some printed burlap that was a pattern of the alphabet that looked like typewriter keys. To create my name labels, I simply cut out the letters that I needed and decoupaged them to a strip of plastic backed burlap.

However, once I had the labels made, I thought it would be nice to have the ability to use them in a more permanent way. I thought about adding a wood base and then remembered my stash of driftwood. Since the burlap that I used for the labels has a plastic backing, it was a little harder to get it to lay out smooth on the wood. It just took a little longer to decoupage the label to the wood but it ended up being fine. If I had been planning on making driftwood signs from the start, I would have used a thinner or more flexible burlap material. Or, I would have just decoupaged the letters directly to the wood. Bu,t I do like the added texture of the burlap strip.

Adding The Hardware For Hanging

Once I had the signs made, I added a hanger. All I did was twist in two eye screws to the top of the driftwood. Then, I attached thin wire by looping the ends through the eye screws and then I twisted the wires to secure it in place.

Sometimes projects just keep on progressing into something more and this happened again with this project. I wasn’t finished yet! You know how when you look at clouds, you can visualize certain images. This happened to me when I looked at the smaller driftwood sign with the name Dayton. I totally saw a car! This called for a little more embellishing.

The Making Of A Car Driftwood Sign

To give the sign just a little more hint of being a car, I added a couple of wheels. I had some small gear embellishments which worked perfectly to resemble wheels. Since I was still going to use the sign as a label for my gift package and that gift happened to be for Christmas, I had to add the look of a tree on top of the car. Yes, I was totally having fun at this point.

Can you see the car resemblance? Another nice thing about driftwood is that some of the pieces are very light weight. This made it easy to hang on the handle of a gift bag for a fun decoration and an extra little gift.

Option Two For Using Burlap Letters

Since I had a third gift package and another small piece of burlap, I decided to try out the technique of just decoupaging the letters directly to the drift wood. Because I was experimenting anyway, I decided to also paint the driftwood to see how that would look.

I think I like this method as well. Especially with the white background to really make the dots pop.

Wood Burned Driftwood Sign

Since I had one more small piece of driftwood, I decided to make another sign but this time using my wood burning tool. Before I actually burned into the wood, I lightly wrote out my word in pencil. Then, all I had to do was trace over my outline with my wood burning tool.

I thought about drawing out a little image of a Christmas tree or something next to the name. However, for a child, I figured something three dimensional would be more interesting. With E6000 craft glue, I applied a small twig and a fun owl bead. Because I was liking that, I added a couple of more beads to the hanging wire.

Painted Driftwood Signs

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Hand lettering, with paint, is another good option for making a driftwood sign. You can practice your lettering with pencil before going over it with paint. If you don’t want to try hand lettering, you could also easily just use stencils. Either paint the word or words directly to the driftwood or first paint the driftwood in a complementary base color.