To recreate Pasticceria Penso’s sign, I took this photo of the actual sign and Photoshopped it into a black-and-white line drawing. The plan was to then use my husband’s Cricut cutting machine to cut out the border and text in gold vinyl. However, “Trieste 1918” was too small to realistically cut, so I settled on just the word “Penso.”
The next step was to decide what to use as the base. I’d learned from experience that balsa wood doesn’t always cut cleanly, especially along curves, so I settled on some 1/32″ birch aircraft plywood that could be cut with scissors. After covering a small piece of wood with self-adhesive black vinyl, I cut out the sign in gold vinyl, applied it over the black, and used scissors to cut out the oval around the gold border. I then applied black vinyl to the reverse side and cut out a second gold image using the Cricut. I thought lining up the oval on the reverse side would be near impossible and therefore had a Plan B already in mind, but to my great surprise and relief, it wasn’t difficult at all.
I had several ideas for the edge of the wood but ended up going with the easiest: metallic gold acrylic paint.
When I installed the concrete veneer on the facade last year, I had held off gluing in the section above the door because I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to build the bracket for the sign. If I made it out of wood, I was thinking of putting a pin through the post from behind the veneer for support. But after deciding to use metal and plastic instead of wood, the pin wasn’t necessary after all. Here is the last concrete veneer glued in place.
It was now time to build the bracket. I used 1/32″ x 1/8″ brass flat bar for the vertical strip. Because the space above the door is so small, I needed to extend the horizontal part of the bracket from the top of the vertical piece rather than the bottom. For this section, I used a 1/8″-square plastic tube. (I would have used metal, but I just happened to have this plastic piece lying around, and it was the perfect size.) As it was rather flimsy, I inserted a 1/16″ square brass tube into the hole for support, another piece that I just happened to have.
For the scrollwork, I curled some 1/64″ x 1/8″ flat bar, trying to imitate the spirals on Penso’s actual sign. (Because of the facade’s molding, the spiral won’t be able to rest flush with the wall.) The tiny ball at the end of the post proved rather difficult to find, since I didn’t want to use a bead with holes in it. After much searching, I was able to find a dozen of these blue “no-hole” beads on eBay. For the hooks, I cut the screw end off a pair of eye screws and glued the loops to the bracket. Before painting, it was quite a mashup of materials!
Here is the bracket spray-painted black.
I drilled holes in the sign for a pair of black jump rings, which I inserted and attached to the loops on the bracket. The final step was to glue the sign to the facade.
