I {heart} U

I have never really decorated much for any other holiday except Christmas, but that has changed this last year. I have really gotten into this crafting stuff. As I was blog surfing the other night - I know you all spend your evenings doing this - I came across this craft:

And yes I had to copy it because it was so simple, clean and not to mention easy! We actually made these at my craft group I host. And another nice thing about this craft is that I had everything I needed to make these right in my home!

I have a neighbor who has a grain business so they get huge orders of grain in on pallets. This last order all her pallets were brand new. She was just going to throw them out with the trash, but I intervened. And these pallets were food grade, so I felt safe to use them in a craft in my home. I just cut them out with my circular saw. Someday I will have some big girl tools, but until then we just make due.

What I did to make these was I took a brush and just dipped the ends into the paint - not a ton of paint on the brush - and then dotted it on the wood and them ran the brush along it to paint it. It is called dry brushing and I read about it somewhere, but I cannot remember where!:( But anyway, it gave it that rustic/weathered look that I wanted, and I did not have to do a ton of sanding!

I just out some letters on my Cricut, and I use the SCAL to make them tall on skinny so they would look good on my boards. I used a re-positionable spray adhesive to make them a stencil. It worked fairly well. You do have to make sure that you have the edges all pressed down.

You then paint them. We did realize that after about the 4 set of these that the stencil was not really holding its own as well. But we found if you painted from the outside to the inside then you had less chance of the paint leaking out the edges. But it looked okay when you did have little areas like that because it is a rustic look. I messed up on the bottom of my I. And yes these boards are not all the same size, but that adds to the character of it.

I then just tied them all together with a ribbon and viola! you are done. I have thought about gluing them, but I have not got to it yet. I placed them on the floor in front of my great quilt tin, and well they only lasted a day there before Thing #5 had them all taken apart and was playing with the ribbon. So now they are on my little counter. 

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