My Crafty Afternoon

I actually meant to do this project a couple of weeks ago, but I'm just now getting around to it. During the summer, we have this anchor thing that hangs on the wall by the door and it has pegs across the bottom and we use it to hang our keys on. Well, since summer is over, I wanted to take it down and replace it with something else. Only I couldn't really find anything I liked that would fit in such a small space. So, I made something! It's cute, it was cheap to make and I can do a new one for Christmas too!

Here are 3 wooden letters I bought at Jo-Ann's a few weeks ago. These are our initials, the "W" and one "L" are smaller than our last name initial.



I picked out a couple of pieces of scrapbook paper I liked that had an Autumn feeling to them and then chose the paint color. I only painted the edges of the letters because that is all that shows and I am lazy. See my post from earlier today. L-A-Z-Y. I picked a nice pumpkin color to paint the edges.







After the paint had dried, I turned the scrapbook paper right side down, turned the letters over so the right side was down, and I traced around them. The "W" was a pain to try and trace out!! As you can see from the paper, I guess some of the paint wasn't dry after all! Oh well.



After cutting out the letters, I used Mod-Podge to glue the paper onto the wood. I used a very thin coat for the smaller two letters since those were primed white when I bought them but the unfinished large "L" soaked up quite a bit of the glue so I had to use more on that one.



After the glue had set up a bit and the paper was firmly attached, I used an Xacto knife blade to trim any little pieces of paper that wasn't aligned perfectly. Then I used a small emery board to sand down any snags along the edges. I then flipped the letters over and attached small sawtooth picture hangers on the back. I forgot to take a picture of that step!

Next I added some bronze cup hooks onto the front of the large "L". I should've measured first and pre-drilled the holes but I was lazy. lol I just eyeballed it and hoped for the best.



Ta-Da...the finished product. I may have the husband rehang these later. I couldn't really reach the wall to hang these where I wanted them but I think they look okay for now. And we can hang our keys up again and stop throwing them onto my very old Louis Vuitton trunk!