People picked up many different hobbies to keep busy during the pandemic, from making sourdough bread to crocheting. For Thorold resident Roseanne Kitney, it was making porch signs.
“I think that a lot of people do it because it’s one of those crafty things that caught on,” says Kitney, while showing off her work to ThoroldToday. “All of a sudden these signs on porches became the thing to have.”
Kitney, who is 66 years old, started creating porch signs back in December 2019, but when the pandemic hit, making signs became her life.
“Nobody could do anything,” Kitney says. “That gave me something to do when I came home at night because we couldn’t go anywhere. We were so stuck inside so it just became this little kind of therapy thing for me. I’d come home, get supper, and go out in the garage.”
To make her signs, Kitney uses a Cricut Machine.
“It’s a machine that’s hooked up to your computer,” says Kitney. “I work out a pattern that I want. You go in and you set up everything. You pick your font, your style, your measurements, then you feed the vinyl into the machine and it does the cutting.”
It might seem like a quick process, but Kitney says it can take a long time to get everything just right.
“The cut is five minutes,” she says. “It’s spending the time figuring out what you want and where you want to put it. Sometimes I could spend two hours looking for a nice font.”
A lot of work goes into painting the wooden sign as well.
“Some people use a paper stencil but I create it with a piece of vinyl,” Kitney says. “You put it on the wood and then I paint it and remove the vinyl, and the pictures I hand paint. I really only use the machine to create the lettering because I can come up with many different fonts.”
In the past few years, Kitney has branched out and taken on different projects, such as toilet roll holders and planters, but porch signs are still her favourite.
“I like making the porch signs just because they’re a lot of fun,” says Kitney. “I am now making planter boxes and hanging planters because people say: ‘Geez, you think you can make this?’ I’m fortunate enough to have a husband who helps me put it together because every time I pound a nail in I’m always worried about it popping out where it shouldn’t be. ”
Working with her hands is something that comes naturally to Kitney.
“I’m just somebody that has to be busy all the time,” she says. “Prior to doing this I could put together a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle in a night. I can’t just watch TV, I have to do something. If I did not have this, I’d be repainting the rooms in my house. That’s what I did prior to when I did the signs.”
Kitney is happy she found her love for porch signs at just the right time.
“I thank God for it to be honest,” she says. “I would have found something to do, because that’s just the way I am. It’s very calming for me. I’ve always painted or done different things but doing it on signs is something completely new. That’s why I enjoy it. It’s like: ‘What can I come up with?’ This to me is so pleasurable, it really is.”
