This latitude and longitude sign is a great way to document all the towns you have lived in.

I love all the large wooden signs that are popping up everywhere.

About a year ago, I bought this one:

It is wonderful, but it was expensive.  After studying it, I decided I could make my own! I had an idea to make something showing the names and coordinates of all the cities/towns where my husband and I have lived, so I began designing.  I use Adobe Illustrator, and I created this:

I was excited to test out my new Silhouette Cameo machine for this project. This machine is amazing, but I probably should have started with a small project rather than jump immediately into a large 2 feet x 4 feet project!  However, I called the silhouette support team, and they were wonderful and helped out this novice silhouette user. Silhouette has a really great program for designing and well as purchasing pre-made designs.  Since I had already created my design in Illustrator, I had to import my design into the Silhouette Studio program.  It was actually fairly easy thanks to this tutorial by Geek Chick Online. Once my design was imported into Silhouette Studio, I had to split my design into two-part since the silhouette machine prints vinyl that is up to 1 foot wide and my design was 2 foot wide.

One little trick I learned is when you are printing something large scale, you need to select “no cutting mat.”

The program will want to print it as a 12 x 12 square – as you can see by the red lines.  Off to the right, there is the option for selecting not cutting mat.  And when you do that, your silhouette machine will print the length of your design.

I printed out my vinyl in two sections.  Once the printing (or cutting) was done, I removed all the extra vinyl.

Silhouette’s little hook comes in handy for the harder-to-reach areas like inside the letters.

Once all the extra vinyl was removed I added the transfer paper to my vinyl.

For the wooden sign, I bought a large plywood board and had it cut into four pieces approximately 2 feet by 4 feet.

I spent around $6 for what became four pieces.

Once home, I painted one of the sides with black paint.  I wanted black lettering, I was going to use my silhouette letters to create a stencil so my sign appeared to be hand-painted.

When the paint was dry, I added my vinyl using the transfer paper.

With my vinyl was on the board, I painted the entire sign with white paint.

Once the paint was dry, I removed the vinyl.

There were some areas I had to touch up with a brush.  I didn’t perfectly match the two separate pieces of vinyl, but with a little paint, it isn’t noticeable. For the frame, I bought a couple of inexpensive furring strips.

And I stained them with dark walnut stain.

I used a chop saw to cut the trim and a nail gun to attach the frame to the sign.

There will definitely be some more DIY projects like this latitude and longitude sign coming thanks to the help of my Silhouette!

Go create something!

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*This post contains affiliate links and is a sponsored post by Silhouette. I take pride in reviewing only products that fit my brand and will be beneficial to my readers. And while this post is sponsored, all the opinions are my own.