I’m hosting a bridal shower in a couple weeks, and I wanted to make something special for our double front doors that I could also gift to the bride. I looked through Pinterest and didn’t find anything that quite struck my fancy, so I adapted several ideas to make these “Mr” and “Mrs” door hangings. They were lots of fun to make, and as an added bonus, they were fairly cheap since I was able to use much of what I already had!
I started with some chipboard letters I got for $1.99 each at Michaels. Wooden letters would work as well, but I knew I wanted a white background, so these saved me a step. Other materials included:
-craft paints
-paintbrush
-round rubber cylinder
-pencil with unused eraser
-toothpicks
-painters tape
-Sharpie pen
-Gloss Mod Podge
-hot glue gun and glue sticks
-silk flowers
-parchment paper (or waxed paper)
-burlap ribbon
-floral wire
Don’t let the long materials list scare you off!
The bride’s favorite color is pink, so I retrieved the black, silver, and pink colors I already had in my stash of craft paints. I plan to use shades of pink, white, and silver to decorate for the shower, and the black element will really make the decorations pop.
Once I’d gathered my materials, my next step was to decide how I wanted to decorate each letter. Since my painting skills are poor, I knew the design couldn’t be too complicated. I also knew I wanted to have some similarities between the letters in “Mr” and “Mrs,” and I wanted pink on the “Mrs” but not on the “Mr.” I picked the letters M from “Mrs” and R from “Mr” to begin.
I used a cylinder (about 1-1/2 inches in diameter) to stamp the first polka dots on the two letters. I found the cylinder in my craft drawer and don’t know where I got it, but any round object with a flat bottom would work.
I stamped both letters with black dots, but CRAP ALERT: some dots did not stay solid or round.
I had to use both the cylinder to reshape several dots and a paintbrush to fill a couple in. One dot remained seriously deformed, but I’d deal with that later.
Next, I used the pencil eraser to stamp smaller silver dots, and the toothpick to stamp black dots on “Mr” and pink dots on “Mrs.” I just dunked the tool into the paint and placed it on the letter. Here’s the completed M. Is that cute, or what?!
I chose the M from “Mr” and the S from “Mrs” to make stripes. My plan was to make the middle letter in “Mrs” — the R — really stand out. I used painters tape on the M and S, placing it diagonally on each letter. One small strip of painters tape helped me keep my stripes evenly spaced.
Once the painters tape was applied, I used the black paint to make the stripes. Easy, peasy. Except I’d neglected to cover up one section where the stripe should have been white. CRAP ALERT again!
Once I removed the painters tape, I used a toothpick to add small colored dots. I used black and silver on “Mr” and pink and silver on “Mrs.” CRAP ALERT: One line was poorly spaced and looked bad, but again, I decided to deal with that later.
My last paint job was to tackle was the R in “Mrs.” I planned to do a chevron stripe. I followed a how-to on Pinterest to cover my design with painters tape and used an Xacto knife to cut out the parts I wanted to paint pink. CRAP ALERT: Once I got everything cut out (a tedious task), it turned out that most of my chevron points fell in the negative space of the R, so it wasn’t at all clear that the design was a chevron.
I removed all the painters tape, and the top layer of the chipboard ripped off. CRAP ALERT: I used a little glue to paste it down again and proceeded as planned.
So I went to plan B: cover the whole letter with pink. Another CRAP ALERT: the pink covered poorly. So I tried wiping some off with a wet paper towel, thinking that my design would look weathered. Wrong! It just looked crappy.
After many coats of pink, I used a Sharpie pen to draw black lines that looked like stitches around the letter and then used the toothpick and silver paint to make dots. Cute, huh?
Once my letters were dry, I applied a thin layer of gloss Mod Podge to seal and develop some shine. To cover up my crapsmanship, I hot glued several silk flowers over my errors.
I then cut two pieces of burlap ribbon about a yard each. Before cutting, I made sure that the letters would fit vertically, leaving about a foot of burlap in the top and bottom. I used hot glue to glue the letters directly to the burlap. I used parchment paper underneath so the glue wouldn’t stick to the counter. Waxed paper would serve the same purpose.
Using an online tutorial, I made two bows out of burlap ribbon (http://diyready.com/how-to-tie-a-bow-with-ribbon/). I used a safety pin to attach each bow to the vertical strip. Using a little bit of floral wire, I fashioned a loop to the safety pin so I could attach each hanging to the hooks on my front doors.
What could be cuter? I know Callia will be tickled, and I certainly won’t tell her about all the crapsmanship that went into their creation!
crapsmanship 