How to Make Wood Burnt Halloween Signs

Pyrography is the art of decorating wood or other materials with burn marks resulting from the controlled application of a heated object such as a poker. It is also known as pokerwork or wood burning.

I think the way the designs look when burned into the wood is spooky, and makes it great for Halloween.  It is a pretty cheap, easy and addictive process.  

You will need: 

• a wood burner (I got mine at Walmart for $10)
• a piece for wood to burn (once again walmart $1.12)
• ribbon
• a glue gun, or strong glue
• a pattern or image you want to burn
• an ink pen, or if you can't find one in the junk drawer, a paper clip
• tape
• a pencil

Step 1 Pick an Image and Resize it

I was making these to have up at my office.  this year we have a few kids that spend parts of the day with us, and we all thought it would be nice to decorate for Halloween.  The oldest is turning 6 next week, so we didn't want any thing too gory.  My son, who is one of the ones hanging around, is in LOVE with Skelanimals, so that is what I chose to use.  

If you don't have an image you already want to use, go to google, and do an image search.  I googled skelanimals and found their website (skelanimals.com) and under the FUN STUFF tab, you can design your own desktop wall paper.  You can pick from all the different characters and pose them different ways, then save them into big images that are really good quality.  My son helped me choose Marcy, the monkey, and Elle, the elephant.

Measure the board you are going to use to know how big to print your image.  My board was 5X7 inches, so when I print the pictures out I just chose to print them at 5X7 inches.  If yours is a different size or the image is not on your computer, use a photocopier and increase or reduce the size until you get it right.