Painted American Flag

So, I realize I missed the 4th of July boat with this one, but who says ya can't show off the American flag all year round?

To make my flag, I started with a 12" wide pine board (which is actually 11.25" and I really don't understand why they say it's 12". I'm feelin' a little jipped!). I cut the board down to 16" and painted it white. Next came the dreadful task of trying to figure out how wide each stripe should be. Let's just say that 13 does not go into 11.25 evenly! And if that wasn't bad enough, next I had to figure out the spacing of the stars. Bring out the Excedrin 'cause math is always sure to give me a headache!

First, I painted the red stripes.

Then the blue.

And then distressed.

And then stained.

What's that? You think I forgot about the stars? No way, silly head! Not after all that measuring! If you look at the photo before the distressing, you will notice little holes where the stars should be. Those are for the thumbtack stars!

Yes, I seriously used thumbtacks as stars =)

And there ya have it! How to make your own flag. But if you are totally feeling like you don't want to get a headache from all the measuring, leave it up to me and check out my Etsy listing on the sidebar. Shameless plug, I know =)



'SPOOKY' Banner

I wanted to jump on the 'banner' bandwagon, and 'spooky' was the first word to pop in my head, so I just went with it.

I started out by cutting 'spooky' out with my new Silhouette machine. Now, you guys are probably thinking I'm one of those cool people who won one off of one of those even cooler blogs, but sadly I'm not. I wanted one so bad that my mom got me one for an early (very early!) birthday and Christmas present. Woohoo!!

Back to the spookiness, I also cut out some circles from orange and white striped paper. I wanted to back those circles with some black paper, but I ended up just tracing a cd and cutting those out myself so I could really maximize the use of the paper. One thing I'm not crazy about with the Silhouette is that it only accepts paper as wide as 8.5 inches...but besides that, I love it! And I'm not getting paid to say that, although I wouldn't mind if I did ;)

I laid it all out to see how it was looking so far, and I felt it still needed something. Anybody else thinkin' cat eyes for the O's? I also wanted to do orange paper behind the black paper, so I traced a cd again, but cut it out with some heartbeat edge scissors.

I wanted to add a little more detail to the banner, so I printed out a bat outline that I found on the web (get it, web? Ok, that probably wasn't very funny) and I cut out 2 bats on black paper then sprinkled them with some black glitter, and I gave them creepy red eyes.

Next, I glued everything to some black ribbon and called it a day!

I'm loving the glittery cat eyes.

I realized it looks pretty boring on the white wall, so I also took some pics 'on location' to show the different possibilities.

On a weathered fence:

I'm lovin' how it stands out against the wood.

And the bats look so sparkly in the filtered sunlight.

(Oops, I think I missed a spot of glitter!)

Don't those eyes look great in the sunlight?

And a pair of eyes are peering through the fence?

It can also be hung on a tree to greet your party guests:

Cheshire cat, anyone?

The bats look like they are right at home!

So many cool possibilities!