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.

Hobby Lobby Home Decor Haul

I decided to get things for my shelving. I have a six shelf layout, that I found on Pinterest and recreated and. I have half of the shelves filled and half that are empty so bought items for them. I have a blue (multi shades of bright blue), teal, gold, and brown beach theme going on in my home and I try to stick to that theme as much as I can for the rooms we did the beach theme for. I also added in a few odd pieces that kind of match other items in the room. Everything in our home kind of goes together in one way or another. I generally wont buy anything at Hobby Lobby unless it's on sale and this week was no exception, I got some pretty good deals. 

DIY Framed Map

I decided to frame a map of SC to put in our home. South Carolina is a very special place to me for various reasons and I thought it would be a nice thing to have around the house. I found a place online I could order a SC map for free and have it mailed to me, so I did. It was a quick and simple project to do, didn't take hardly any time and the only money I had to put into it was the cost of the frame.

I bought this nice frame from Hobby Lobby to put the map in.

Laid the glass from the frame down on the map and traced around it and cut the part out I wanted.

Put the map in the frame, and it's done.