How to Make Your Own Marquee Signs
Today I'm finally sharing the marquee '28' signs that I made for my Golden Birthday Party! I used the marquee to complete my photo booth area. To my surprise this project was actually very easy and just a little time consuming. I got the idea from Chloe Moore Photography and the pictures from Oh Happy Day helped me the most! I really love how the entire area came together especially with the fun photo booth props!
Supplies:
- Foam core
- Poster board
- Exacto knife
- Hot glue gun
- Ruler
- 4 cans of satin spray paint in your color preference
- 2 Strings of Lights
- PVC Pipe to hang from
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Being quite the perfectionist, I did not want to take the time drawing the 28 until I was happy with it. I came up with the idea to use my computer instead. I found a font that I liked and blew up each number so that one number would print out on four pages. Then I taped the pieces together for each number and cut them out. I affixed the black cut outs to the foam core and traced around to get my outline. Then hubby and I went to work cutting out the numbers with an exacto knife, it was much faster with two of us cutting instead of just me.
Once we had the numbers cut out I spaced out and traced holes with a dime on each number. I traced 14 holes on the '2' and 15 on the '8'. Then I cut out each hole.
After cutting all of the holes out, I cut the poster board into 5.5" strips like Oh Joy suggests. I traced a line down the middle of each strip of poster board so that it would help me evenly glue on the strips to the foam core numbers.
For me this was definitely a two person job, it's possible to do alone, but it was so much easier with the extra set of hands. One of us held the foam core number steady while the other hot glued along the pencil line.
After we hot glued all of the poster board to the foam core numbers I was ready to spray paint! I picked dark blue spray paint because I thought it would look great with my gold backdrop. I bought two cans of spray paint at first and quickly learning that was absolutely not enough. I ended up having a hard time finding the spray paint I needed and ended up going to several craft stores before finding it in stock. By the way spray painting gloss on top of satin does not work on poster board, luckily when I got the right spray paint it covered the gloss attempt no problem.
After the numbers dried, I put the lights into the numbers. Somewhere in the middle I had to connect the second strand of lights, I also had to unscrew the three lights that hung in between the 2 and the 8. Once I got all of the lights in I unscrewed any of the bulbs I didn't attach to the numbers and set them aside. By the way be careful not to step on any of the spare bulbs...it really hurts and you bleed a lot :/
Hanging the numbers was another two man job. We actually had some PVC pipe in the garage that hubby drilled two keyholes into and then put two screws in the wall where I wanted the photo booth. This made it really easy to drape the gold fabric over the PVC and then slide the PVC onto the screws.
Before hanging the entire thing on the wall, I balanced the PVC onto two chair backs to help get an idea of what we needed to do and how we needed to adjust things.
To attach the numbers I used fishing line and hung it around the PVC pipe. In order to get all of the cords hidden I cut small slits into the gold fabric where the cord was going to run down to the outlet. The most exciting thing was plugging in the lights and seeing all of my ideas come to fruition!
The photo booth turned out way better than expected and everything was extremely sturdy!
This project was a lot of fun! Like I mentioned a tiny bit time consuming, but spreading the steps out over several nights made it seem much more manageable! 