From Pallet to Flag

Hello, ladies. I’m pretty excited that I finally got to finish my flag project. Two flags, as a matter of fact.

I wanted to paint a USA flag and a Canadian flag on old wood. For my purposes, I used a pallet that we had lying around. I removed the boards, cut them to the size I wanted and then we attached them together by laying a couple of strips of wood down and stapling the boards I wanted to them.

Sorry, I don’t have a picture of the underside to show you how we attached them but you probably have it figured out already anyways… right?

pallet project

The next step was to prime the boards. I used Kiltz. I wanted to prime them so that I wouldn’t have to use as much paint in the final process. (Note: I’m really a newbie at painting but I’ve read a lot of blogs and they always talk about priming so I asked my husband plenty of questions about it, so that I could understand better why I needed to do it at all.)

Kiltz is an oil based primer so I ended up throwing away the paint brush when I was done since it was an inexpensive one. If you get it on your hands, it wants to stay. You need some kind of

I started painting the Canadian flag first since that seemed like it was going to be the easiest. I used masking tape to define my areas. Red on the left and right and white in the middle. I found a Canadian Maple leaf online and printed it out using Printmaster. I then traced the leaf onto the wood.

The finished piece…

Next up was the United States of America flag. It went pretty well except I was stumped on what I was going to use for the stars. I asked for different ideas and my son thought of making a stamp. Then I rememberd I had a rubber stamp with stars. I used my paint brush to apply white paint to the biggest star and then stamped them on. After each star was stamped I had to reapply the white paint.

Here’s the finished USA flag.

I’m using these to decorate my boys’ bedroom. They’re now mounted on the wall and I think they look pretty good. I’ll show you the mostly finished corner next week.

Have a great weekend!

Joining up with

Domestically Speaking

Romance on a Dime

12 Comments

Anna

March 17, 2012 at 5:39 pm Reply

HEEEEEY…That’s a pretty amazing job…(Sounded difficult to me.) Looking forward to pictures of them on the wall. 🙂

Zoe

March 19, 2012 at 10:21 am Reply

I really like the Canada flag, but the USA flag is pretty neat 2!
Great job, what a creative idea 🙂

Elisabeth

March 20, 2012 at 5:33 am Reply

Thanks, Zoe & Anna. They were fun to make. Even the USA flag with all its stripes and stars wasn’t bad.

Kaitlyn

March 19, 2012 at 3:05 pm Reply

I really like this idea!!! You are so creative!

Elisabeth

March 20, 2012 at 5:31 am Reply

I really don’t feel very creative, Kaitlyn. I’m working on it though. Your mom is really good and I get inspired by what she does, too.