Red Hat Chapter Sign

My Red Hat Chapter, The Allegheny River Scarletts, decided to participate in the July 4th parade this year. We arranged for a red pick-up truck and a trailer. They asked me to paint two signs for the trailer. We decorated the trailer with all sorts of red and purple--red and purple skirts surrounding the outside edges of the trailer, purple and red tissue paper flowers, a patio umbrella covered with purple and strung with red beads topped with tissue paper flowers. We ended up putting one sign on the truck's grill and the other on the back of the trailer. Then we had several of our Red Hat sisters ride on our float down the parade route. It was a fun day. The very best part of the day, however, was that we won first place in our division. My husband said the only reason we won was because of my signs. (He can be a real sweetie when he wants to be.) I forgot to take pictures of the signs, so I had to depend on getting a photo from someone else. Unfortunately, the photo I was given cut parts of the sign off. Both signs are identical. So, here it is--mostly-- the sign that helped us win first place and a check for $125.00.



How to do it?-- Buy the largest foam core sheets you can find. The ones I bought came from Staples and were approximately 30x40 inches. Basecoat the sheet of foam core with the color of your choice. Some colors take a lot of paint to give you good coverage. Purple is an example. I think there are three coats of paint on the board. (contrary to the photo, it IS purple!)

Next, figure out what your sign will say and go to your word processing or publishing software. I use Printmaster. One of the features of this software is the ability to create shapes with your text and then to print your work out as large as you need it to be. You can try a bunch of different fonts until you find the one that a. fits your theme and b. looks good/readable when you alter the shape of the text. I went to the Red Hat Society website to get the logo hat (which we, as an official chapter are allowed to use) so that I could add it to my sign. Finally, when I was satisfied with the design, I printed it out to full size. The software divides large posters into tiles and prints as many 8.5x11 sheets of paper as it takes to print the required size.

Now you need to transfer your design to the poster. Tape all your tiles together and position the sheets over your foam core. Put an appropriate color transfer paper between the design and the foam core and trace the design with a stylus or a ballpoint pen. For dark backgrounds use white transfer paper; for dark, use graphite paper.

When you are painting a fairly transparent color like most reds over a dark background you need to first basecoat the areas to be painted with a light, neutral color. I like to use a pale grey for most of these applications unless my final color is yellow. For yellow, I basecoat with white. When the basecoat is dry, paint the final color. Most often you will need two coats. To make the lettering a little more interesting, I painted a line of silver on the left side of all the letters. You will notice that the silver line changes position with the "light". It is always on the left side of the line.

The last step was to take some silver glitter paint and put it on the painted feathers on the logo hat. I also had a large purple feather to attach to the sign. I glued it in place and then painted it with silver glitter paint as well. The glitter paint helped to hold the feather in place on the sign.