Crafting

Never before did I consider myself 'crafty' or very creative. Sure, I like to draw and paint but that (for me) is replicating something that already exists. 'Crafting' by my definition would be coming up with a new idea and then creating it.  Since moving into our own home I've been getting these crafting urges...the need to decorate, create.  I decided to come up with something for spring...something made from materials around the house that we already had on hand. These are what I came up with:

Here's how the project proceeded: 

August cut a beam of worn out wood from the yard into 6 squares for me. They are 3 1/2 inches all around.  We sanded them. 

I chose a font I liked and then sized it in Photoshop to fit the size of my square blocks.

I printed the desired letters, at the desired size.

I then chose different card-stock papers that suited the project and traced the printed letters onto the card-stock. Then I cut the letters out with scissors. 

I didn't want all 6 sides of the blocks to be left just wood so I used 2 other materials to cover some of the sides: 1) acrylic paint (yellow, blue, and green ) and 2) more card-stock, cut to the block size.

After painting a few sides on each block, I began gluing the card-stock squares and letters onto the blocks. 

I was using spray adhesive first and it was so sticky and toxic that I decided to try plain old elmer's glue. 

This worked like a charm. 

When everything had dried, I sanded. I just lightly sanded the corners and around the edges of the blocks.

Lastly, I painted the blocks with polyurethane to seal them.

The blocks have several letters on each so that I can switch them up to say Spring or Summer with several different patterns.

Here's my whole little display (for now...its still missing something...). If you like my branches with tissue paper flowers on them, here is a tutorial on how to make the flowers. I attached the flowers to branches found in our neighborhood using pipe cleaners. 

This project was a lot of fun and it might just lead to others in the future!