A New Addition (and a sign to go with!)

About a month ago, we added a new girl to our family.  Meet Ali:

This was about an hour after we got her home…she made herself comfy on the couch.  She is so sweet, we are all absolutely in love with her, and best of all, she loves Lucy!  It is hilarious to watch them play together.  She immediately attached herself to my son:

Seriously attached.  She follows him around everywhere.  She cries when he leaves.  For like hours (no exaggerating!).  So now she is his new fishing/camping buddy.  She loves the boat and gets to go every time they go fishing.  Thankfully (for me and my sanity) she loves the boat! One big adjustment with a  Beagle (that we didn’t have to worry about with Lucy) is her bark…she’s loud…and there’s more than one bark…there’s her cry (mostly for Dima) and her howl, and her bark.  She is LOUD.  And, did I mention my husband works graveyard…and that she’s LOUD…so we’ve had to adjust a bit to keep an eye on her and what she’s keeping an eye on (her favorite spot is the couch by the window, so she can watch everything). This brings  me to the necessity of my next project:

We had been having A LOT of ‘visitors’ lately, and Ali, doing her job, barks each and every time one of them knocks on the door.  For a couple of days, we were frantically trying to shush her while the ‘visitor’s came to the door, but it got pretty stressful pretty quickly, so, I  grabbed some wood from the stash and repurposed it into this sign.  To make it, I base coated it Oil Rubbed Bronze, then added the vinyl (just the ‘soliciting’ and ‘religious’),  then painted it red.  Once dry, I added the two “NO” words and the ‘queries’  in vinyl , and then painted the whole thing white. Once it was almost dry, I removed all the vinyl.  Once completely dry, I sanded it and added some stain to make it look old (it faces the afternoon sun outside and will get all the rain, wind, etc., so I figured if it started out looking beat up, I wouldn’t be sad when it ended up looking that way).  The next day I added a layer of clear top coat, and added the wires to hang it, and here we are.  And, to my relief, we have not had a single visitor since I put it up (and no struggles with Ali barking!).  Yay!

One more cute picture of Ali (with her new toy Alligator):

Thanks for stopping by.