Go Big or Go Home
I often get inspired by Pinterest which, in turn, inspires my next crafting adventure. This project was a doozy. Normally I would suggest starting small as a practice run. I never do that. I'm way too impatient for that. I expect results right away. Usually I mess up the first try and end up back at Home Depot or Michael's or JoAnn's (you get the picture). This one was a big leap of faith because I was definitely "going big!" I needed a big art piece for my dining room wall and opted for a hybrid of multiple projects I saw on Pinterest. So not only was I thinking outside the box but the box was a five foot by two foot piece of wood! Go big or go back to Home Depot I always say! Luckily it turned out pretty damn good...and on the first try no less.
Let's start at the beginning and take it step by step. In this case, it started with me sitting at my dining room table for a few months staring at a blank wall wondering what to put there.. Okay, who am I kidding, it was a year and a half after moving into our new house that I finally got the energy to tackle this design challenge. It's a big wall next to another big wall where I had already mounted a gigantic museum wall with tons of smaller frames (more on that in a different post, let me know if you're interested in that one). I knew I needed to do a larger piece but the thought of a craft that size made me want to lay down and take a nap.
Once the design bug hit me, I knew I needed to harness it quickly before it went away and hibernated again for another six months. My first step is always to check in with my best friend, Pinterest. I started out with a generic search for signs or art and stumbled across a few that looked like I could handle them. I think that's the most important part; knowing what you can copy or, for the more advanced Pinterester, modify and create. Most of these crafts have links to a blog that will explain exactly how to create the piece. If it doesn't, then I modify my search again and find more images just like it. Chances are you will eventually stumble across a website that will have step by step instructions.
To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, these were the posts on Pinterest I was inspired by:
I followed the links to both of these websites and figures out how to make a pallet sign. (If you're interested in either of these you can read The Space Between blog for the pallet word art sign or A Little Bit Funky blog for the other sign. My point in showing you the various Pinterest posts is so you don't get overwhelmed by all of the pretty pictures. Find a few as inspiration and read about how to do it. You can either stop there and just do a straight up copy or you can keep going and make yourself a crazy person. I pretty much always opt for the latter.
I liked both of these signs but they weren't exactly what I wanted. I did a straight up copy of the sun image (as you can see from my finished product above) but I hadn't decided on a saying yet, and I wasn't sure how distressed I wanted it to look. So I consulted my friend, Pinterest, one more time and started searching pallet signs. More images popped up and I scrolled through those for a while until I found some images that had tutorials attached on how to distress the wood.
For those of you keeping score, here are a few more of my research pins on distressing the pallet signs (click on the image to check out their blogs):
I still couldn't decide, mostly because Pinterest is like crack and it's hard to stop after just a few images. Also, because I have a hard time committing and just starting the project. Usually I mess something up on the first try so it makes me a little gun shy. My motto in these instances is to just commit and start. You can always paint over it or cut it smaller or toss it out and start over. My second attempts are usually genius because of the crap I messed up on the first go around.
Don't let the finished product fool you, it took me forever to finally pick a saying for my sign and I made multiple trips to the store for just the right color wood stain. Clearly I have commitment issues, otherwise it wouldn't have taken me a year and a half to finally start the project! I even searched Pinterest for sayings and scrolled through pages and pages before getting frustrated and just picking one. Don't even get me started on finding a font! That was another endless search. There are tons of free downloadable fonts on Pinterest as well, by the way. The lesson here is that sometimes Pinterest is a fickle little bitch. She can inspire your genius and she can mire you in details. When your own internal designer gets sparked by an image or font or idea, stop and follow that urge.
That's the big take away from this post. I found my few inspiration posts and re-pinned those. Then I moved to the next piece of research and re-pinned that. Once I was finished with the research I went back through the pins and stared at them until the plan materialized. Gather up all the supplies you already have, head to the store to get what you need, and just start! It might not end up like the pretty pictures on Pinterest but it will be cool and worthy of your house because it came from your brain. And no one has to know you copied it from Pinterest. She's a good friend that way, she doesn't care when you steal her stuff.
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