This falls in the same category as the serving tray I made in a previous post. This is just a little different, but serves the same purpose. My wife actually saw something like this on Pinterest and wanted me to replicate it after I made the tray in the previous post
I started with a large piece of plywood laminate. Nothing fancy, just scrap that I had in my workshop. I traced out the large circle and cut it with my scroll saw. As you can imagine, cutting out a perfect circle is very difficult. There were some deviations from the line during the cutting; nothing a little sanding couldn't fix!
I sanded it down using my handheld sander and smoothed out the edges to make it look like a perfect circle. The next step was the stain!
I used Minwax dark walnut stain on all surfaces and let it fully cure. Afterwards, I painted a whitewash mixture (50% water, 50% white paint) generously over the entire surface. I let it sit for approximately 10 seconds, and took a rag to it. This "smudging" and wiping of the whitewash mixture took most of it off, but left a nice "gray" color behind!
I cut out a stencil for the word "Gather" from cardstock paper. I taped it down to the tray and spray painted over it with an off-white color (the same I used for the lettering on the "familia" sign). After removing the stencil, the word was there, but it needed some touch-up! There were some "oopsies," like the letter "G." I just went over them with a paintbrush and tightened up the edges to make it look neater.
Once the paint dried, I added a thick coat of poly to seal it up.
Lastly were the handles. I found these at Hobby Lobby and got them both for under $10. I added them on for the final step, and you can see the result above.
Recommendations for next time: I would have done a better job at centering and securing the stencil. I might have used an adhesive of some kind maybe to keep it on, because there was some running of colors outside of the lines.
Overall, I really like how this came out! It's the little mistakes that make something unique, and my wife absolutely LOVED opening it on Christmas
-Kevin
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