Painted Wooden Letters

Christmas is almost here!  Between attending parties, shopping for family members, making my own wish list and, of course, working, I found a little time to be creative!

I've been planning this project for a while.  I planned to have completed it when I decorated for Christmas (but I hadn't even ordered the wooden letters).  Several months ago, I stumbled upon this site on Pinterest.  It offers completely customizable wooden letters.  You're able to choose the font, height and thickness of the letters that you choose (price depending on height and thickness).



This is what the letters looked like when I received them (above).  It's tough to see in the photos, but the letters have a dark brown edge.  This is due to the thickness of the letters that I ordered.  The thinner letters are cut with a laser (which leaves the dark edge) while the thicker letters are cut with a computer controlled router (all of this information can be found on the website).

To paint the letters, I first painted a thin line of brown around the edge of each letter (this is much more obvious on "Joy" than "Noel" because of the size of the letters).  Then, I painted the entire letter with red or green (not the base red or green - I mixed paints to get the colors that I wanted).  On top of the red and green, I added bronze paint (not all over, just in a few key spots).

I glued the "Noel" letters together using E600 glue, but not the "Joy" letters (because they didn't fit well together).  I learned about E600 glue through a Michael's tutorial.  It's pretty good stuff.  If you haven't tried it, you should!

I hope you found this post inspiring and/or helpful!

T-shirt Bag

Today was a busy day - church and then leading a team of teenagers to decorate the youth room.  The service was awesome as always (if you're in the Jupiter area, you really should check out Generation Church).  The cheesy Christmas theme in the youth room is complete (though I really wanted one of those old plastic yard figurines to complete my "design").  After dinner I tried making a peppermint chocolate chip milk shake, but we didn't have enough ice cream so it was really just peppermint chocolate chip milk (no shake).  And then, instead of watching the BCS Bowl Selections (because I already knew where Florida would play and who we would play), I decided to let my creative juices flow.

I went upstairs with no plan in mind and ended up with this cute little drawstring t-shirt bag.  I tried drawing on the first one that I made, but drawing on a t-shirt was much more difficult than I expected (I was thinking of writing a name and drawing some sort of small design - I probably could have made it work, but I gave up quickly in favor of the cute red flowers).

This was a pretty simple project.  

1.  Cut a rectangle from a t-shirt.

2.  Place string (could be any type of thick string - I didn't have any so I made my own with a black t-shirt) about half an inch from the top of the rectangle, fold the t-shirt over it and sew the folded piece down (so that the string is kind of inside of a tube).

3.  Fold the rectangle in half so that it's inside out and sew the bottom seam (if you're going to sew anything onto the front of the bag, you'll want to do it before starting step 4*).

4.  With the bag still inside out, sew the open side shut.

5.  Turn the bag ride side out, test your drawstring to make sure it works, and you're done!

* To make the flowers, I cut the flower from a small a piece of felt (freehand) and cut a small dot from a black t-shirt for the center.  I sewed them onto the bag by making a small "X" in the center of each flower.

These bags could be made in lots of colors and sizes and could be used for gift-giving, storage, decorating and many other things!