What we did to make our lawn signs was take a bunch of cardboard (which was handily available because Betsy just got a new dining set from Ikea), cut it into pieces (we should have made them smaller), trim them with masking tape (to make them more water-resistant), and paint them with primer (for water resistance and general beauty).
Then we made some letters to stencil.
My favorite stencil (which I made): "Democatic." It was a mistake that I only noticed after painstakingly cutting out the whole thing.
We used interior house paint to do the painting. There were some experiments with sparkles and stuff, but they didn't catch on. I ended up using giant Sharpies on a lot of them after the paint had dried -- outlining letters and such, and that tightened things up a bit. Then we used a heavy duty stapler to staple the signs to posts. A local lumber yard made the posts for me by cutting some longer piece of wood in half and then sharpening the edges. Cost effective ($.50 per post) but sticky! (pine sap). I had a problem with the staples going all the way through some card board, and fixed that by putting packing tape on top. If I did it again, I might put masking tape down the center before painting them to give the staple something to stick to.
Here are the results -- I made a couple voter registration ones, too:
They look pretty good, if I do say so. One problem I had with the bigger signs is if it's windy, they can sort of flop in half. The smaller signs (like the "Go Bama" one) work better, and if I was going to do it again and had a longer message I'd make a series of them, a la Burma Shave signs.
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