Come Thou Fount

Well, it finally happened. I knew it would. Pintrest disappointed me. However, I do have a new piece of art hanging in my home, so I guess the endeavor was not a complete loss. Either way, last week's simple project quickly turned into a traitorous journey.

Thanks to Pintrest and HGTV, my living room is finally filling with unique touches that make it feel like my home. However, as I stand back and look at my creation, it becomes more and more obvious that my house is seriously lacking in the area of inspiration; meaning there are many things that add style, color, beauty, warmth and conversation topics, but few things (if any) that offer encouragement, affirmation or personal challenge. I realize I could be asking a lot from a canvas and paint, but I do know this - God's Word changes people and I would rather live in a house where the walls change me then in a house where the walls change to match a trend.

My journey began when I found a perfectly cut piece of particle board in my garage. I knew it would be the perfect size and shape for a new project. I know particle board is cheap, but it has a really cool look to it and I was excited to see the transformation.

Because the board was not quite the shade I wanted, I stained it with one coat of cheap wood stain I got at Wal-Mart.

Then I made a heart shaped stencil out of paper and taped it to my board.

After that I painted around the stencil just to give the heart a little depth and dimension (and because that is what someone did on Pintrest and I really liked their end product).

Next it was time to fill in the heart with red paint.

After that came the tricky part. I knew I wanted one of my favorite lines from Come Thou Fount (an old hymn) next to the heart and I saw a Pintrest tutorial on easily transferring words/letters/phrases to wood. Unfortunately, when I got to this part of the project I realized my printer was out of ink and then when I bought new ink I realized my printer (that hadn't been used since 2009) was in fact broken and didn't have the setting I needed anyway. So I ended up creating and styling the phrase in Microsoft Word and then emailing it to myself at work so that I could just print it out on Monday morning.

Thankfully I started this project in my home office so I could leave everything out, close the door, and come back to it later in the week.

After printing out one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite hymns and using a printer setting to print it backward, a Pintrest tutorial said all I had to do was place the print out face down on the board, paint over it with water, and then rub over the letters with a marker cap.

Unfortunately, when I pulled back the damp paper, I realized the letter transfer didn't work at all. What a bummer.

I was pretty determined to salvage the project though so I grabbed some tracing paper, copied the words by hand onto the tracing paper, made stencils out of the words, and then traced them on the board using a black pencil. Not ideal, but a workable solution.

Thanks to a few years of art classes throughout my lifetime, I have acquired a pretty steady hand along with some nice paint brushes and I was able to fill in the letters pretty easily using some watered down, black, acrylic paint.

Not as great as I was hoping for, but not too bad for basically free handing the whole thing.

Finally, after letting everything dry, I rubbed some sand paper over the whole thing to rough it up a little bit. Then I combined a few drops of white paint with a clear gloss and brushed it over the entire board.

Just to add a little more interest, I added some twine to the top. Helpful hint: buy the real twine not the craft twine because it's a fraction of the price.

I wasn't thrilled to death with the final product, but I spent basically nothing so I can't really complain.

What do you think?