Happy Monday everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend. I had a fantastic few days visiting some family, and got to do some (marathon) thrift furniture shopping, all on my own without the little guy. It was looking a little dire there for a minute, as I wasn’t able to find anything close to what I want for bedside tables (especially in the price range I wanted!); but wouldn’t you know it, on our very last stop I found exactly what I was looking for…so I didn’t come home empty handed after all! I’ll share some sneak peaks with you soon!

Thanks to all of you for your oh-so-lovely comments on our entryway gallery wall I showed you last week! I am so flattered by all the lovely things you said – I am thrilled with how the wall turned out, and am so excited you all like it too! As promised, I am back today to show you how I made this little cutie:

I kinda cheated…because I started with this:

It’s a cutting board from Target. Yep, you read that right. I found it on the bottom shelf a few months ago. It was $25, but since the rim of it was already painted the same blue color as our house…

…and it was a cutout of the USA (I had been looking for “Americana-thmed” things), I thought it was worth the price! I knew I could do something really cool with it for our wall. I show you how I did it after the jump!

For a while, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Do I paint it? Put hearts on it for all the places we’ve lived?? (But I already did that here!). Put fabric on it? Stencil it? Then, I saw a really neat print Sarah has in her Etsy shop…(by the way, check out her blog too because she does some amazing stuff!!)

I loved the sentiment so much – “Home is wherever I’m with you.” – it’s perfect for our very transient family without being overly sappy. To capture the same effect on the wooden USA, I cut out the phrase from vinyl in every cricut font I had, and varied the font size based on what space I was trying to fill up.

I cut and applied as I went. I started with some bigger stretches of the phrase and then filled in the holes with smaller fonts. I went back and forth cutting and apply, using an exacto knife (to pry the letters from the vinyl) and a tweezers to place the (especially small) letters.

It was a little tedious, but really fun to puzzle-peice the whole thing together! It doesn’t use that much vinyl (I cut all the letters using one 12″24″ piece), and after a while…it was all full!

Once all the letters were applied, I went back with the exacto knife and cleaned up all the edges, making sure those letters that ran off the edge had a nice clean cut.

To hang it on the wall, Greg drilled some holes in the back about 1/4″ or so deep – deep enough to hang on some screws but not so deep they popped through the other side! We then drilled some screws into the wall to line up with the holes in the back and placed the USA onto the screws. Doing it this way meant that the whole piece was flush with the wall (rather than having a hanging bracket).

It adds a neat graphic element and introduces some different textures not otherwise found on the wall.

On Wednesday, I am going to “close” the chapter on this little entryway, recapping all of the posts and projects that went into this little space. I’ll have lots of before and after photos (my fav!)  so be sure to check back. Friday, I plan to reveal the “baby’s room (he’s almost two, can I still call him a baby?)

See You Soon!
Megan