Giving Thanks, in writing

A few weeks ago our Ladies' Auxiliary held a vendor's market at the fire station. A few firefighters helped us all day long, setting up, BBQ-ing, helping vendors and more. We we wanted to give a simple token of appreciation and decided on some homemade plaques. Nothing fancy, but sincere.

I just transfered images onto wood plaques. They were prettty simple to make, actually. I searched online for some image transfer tutorials. Most of them required a gel or some medium and a process involving several steps. "Ain't nobody got time for that"  I reduced them down to a few steps and they came out just fine.

I used:
wood plaques - got 'em at Walmart for $.97. You can get them at Hobby Lobby or Michael's too.
Parchment paper - I cut 8.5x11 sheets of it. Word of advice: iron it before using. It makes it uncurl, and a little bit stiff for printing. (I tried wax paper at first, but it messed up pretty bad when printing and it got jammed in my printer.)
credit card - for rubbing your image onto the plaque

This is just a personal preference, but I used a wood burning tool to "age" the edges just a bit.

I worked up an image and reversed it. Then I printed onto the waxy side of the parchment paper.
I only used one sheet at a time. I didn't know how quickly the ink would set so I wanted to get the images onto the wood as soon as I could.

I cut the image to the size I was going to use so that I could be sure to center it on my plaque. Then, I carefully laid the paper down onto the wood and holding it still, I began to rub.

Once I had the imaged transfered, I let it set for a few minutes. The last thing I did was spray it with hair spray. HAIR SPRAY. It is a fixative, after all, and it worked like a charm. It kept the ink from smearing.

The finished products were simple, rustic and pretty nifty if I don't say so myself!