DIY Wall Art from Modified Shanty-2-Chic Tutorial

Hi all! I am so excited to share this most recent project with you guys… but first a little background on our little group.

In January a few of my closest girlfriends and I started a monthly craft night. What started as a “learning to sew” group has now grown into a more general craft night. First we crafted aprons, which was so fun and my first ever project hand sewn by me! Since I don’t cook very often, so far I’ve only worn it making cookies for Super Bowl! ha! Then the next month we made curtains. I can not wait to show you how those came out, I made them for the office which is SO close to being done!

Okay okay, so then in March we decided to have a 2 night craft project, making the wooden wall art from Shanty-2-Chic, that we had made for Amie’s wedding.

The first night, we stained our boards, cut out stencils for the letters, and learned how to make the fabric flowers (tutorial here).

Some behind the scenes iPhone photos…

Those pesky flowers sure took way more time than any of us predicted! My board alone has over 130 flowers and each one takes about 5 minutes to assemble. Ugh, don’t try to do the math there!

But it was totally worth it!!

Of course, I wanted to try to do a different kind of design than the LOVE, something that was more unique to my husband and me—since it was going in our bedroom. I kept playing around with “established ’07” designs but was just not loving it. Then my friend Lauren reminded me of our first dance song “Me And You” by Kenny Chesney. Which then inspired me to create the board based on my beloved ampersand (&) sign. And let me tell you, I absolutely looooooove this project!!

The next night, when we all got together with quite a few flowers completed, we laid out our stencils on our nice dry boards and painted out the designs. Once that was dry, we started to add our flowers, but none of us finished that night as we had a ways to go with our flowers. But it was so fun over that next week seeing the girls complete their boards.

Lauren was smart and chose to not have flowers at all, and I love how simple yet just as gorgeous and rustic hers came out! She also decided to do something different for her board. And I was so happy to hand letter the “love” for her!

With all that to say, hope you love how our boards came out! Here are some freebies for you, PDFs of all 4 of the designs you see above!

– the sanserif LOVE based on the Shanty-2-Chic original

– Amie’s serifed LOVE

– Lauren’s Love from a 1 John verse

– and my You & Me design

And I’ll end this post with a fun “I just finished and I’m so proud of this project” iPhone photo, taken late at night while I was crafting in my jammies!