Throughout our wedding planning, my wife and I decided to do many of the traditional decorations in DIY style to save money and mostly out of sheer principle (anything related to a wedding seems to have a 200% premium applied to it) – no thanks. So we did all of our own centerpieces and had a “beer fountain” made out of blue kiddie pools stacked on a piece of plywood (covered in a black table cloth). We made our name tent place holders from a log we found on the side of the road.
We decided to create a sign to designate the (self-service) bar area. This design would also have the added benefit of using up a bunch of beer bottle caps I had been collecting for who knows what. I designed the sign around a font I found on the internet and took two 2′ x 4′ 1/4″ plywood pieces. I cut the front into three pieces to try to give it a barn/wild west kind of look.
I traced and cut out the letters using a jigsaw. The straight nature of the font helped with this. I burned various parts of the plywood with a butane torch. This 1/4″ plywood definitely does not burn as well as I had hoped when I started. I was hoping it would burn as nicely as solid wood – like the coffee table I had done recently. Oh well, it still achieved sort of the same look I was going for.
I took a 1/2″ square dowel and cut it into 3/4″ segments. We hot-glued the dowels to the plywood backer (I had not yet properly discovered the strength of wood glue) and then tried to glue the beer caps to the dowel. Unfortunately, beer caps have a teflon coating on their backs. This teflon material does not bond to glue very well at all, but we did our best. The caps ended up being pretty precarious. I glued spacers between the letters and into the middle of the letters to hold the interior portions of the “B”, “A”, and “R”.
The caps were a bit delicately placed on there and with some force they did tend to fall off. Some that would not stick, I ended up brad nailing onto the dowels. Unfortunately, this force would then cause a bunch of others to pop off. After a while we got them to stay pretty well. It lasted through the wedding which is all we were asking for.
