DIY Coastal Letter

I've been getting into the wooden letters lately. I've bought several from various places to decorate different ways. This is my first DIY letter project, and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It took me about 3 hours to make it which is way more time than it should take all of you if any of you choose to make this. As I do this tutorial I will explain why it took me so long. This is a pretty simple and cheap project to do, and I had a lot of fun making it, can't wait to make more letters in the future.

What you need:

Wooden letter (Michaels)
Super glue (4 pack Hobby Lobby $3.77) I ended up using 3 tubes on this project.
Paint (if you plan to paint your letter) as well as painting supplies, whatever you want to use to paint with.

Glass gems (Michaels or you can get $1.00 packs at the Dollar Tree)
Mixed bag of seashells (Michaels) or natural shells from the ocean if you have some on hand.
White rope (Hobby Lobby)
Aluminum foil

The glass gems I used. I got 1 large pack of teal at Michaels and 2 small packs of light blue at the Dollar Tree. I bought too many but my letter was medium sized and I wanted extra for future projects, buy enough to fit whatever size letter you have.

This is the rope i bought and the seashells I bought.

Step 1:

Paint your letter, mine went from white....

To a pretty coastal blue color.

Step 2:

Take your glass pieces and super glue them onto your letter. Sorry don't have any photos of this step, forgot to take some photos while gluing down the gems. Before gluing gems it's best to arrange them on the letter before gluing to see how you want them to go, than glue them down once you have them arranged how you want them.

Step 3:

After gluing your gems on, cut a piece of rope. Loop your rope where you want it on your letter like I did. If you don't like how I did mine you can always do a bow, or swap the rope out for white ribbon and tie a pretty bow. This took me a little bit of time as well. I had to figure out how I wanted the rope to look, if I wanted it in a bow or what, eventually came up with the idea to do the rope this way, reminds me of sailing this way.

Step 4:

Arrange your shells and glue your shells to your letter.

This is what took me the longest, I had to figure out how to glue the shells down. After about a hour my husband came up with the idea to stuff the shells with aluminum foil. After getting the foil formed we glued the foil to the shell then glued the shell to the letter.

Step 5:

Allow the glue to dry then you are finished.