Rustic Flag Sign

I have never....ever...decorated for patriotic holidays.  I'm not sure why, but it's never been on my radar to do.  For some reason, this year I am excited to decorate with red, white, and blue.....the only problem is that I don't have much of a budget right now for home decor!

So my goal has been to do it for FREE!!

I've had this ugly sign forever....it's from my "country-fied" days....that lasted all of about 1 year!  The poor sign just keeps getting put behind shelves, under couches....just to keep it out-of-sight!!

But, today, I was inspired!!  What if I flipped it over and started another sign???

I've been seeing really fun flag and patriotic sign-age all over the blog-world, so I wanted to turn this into a rustic flag sign.  The only problem was that it was too long....so I had hubby cut it for me.  (I'll show you tomorrow what I did with the smaller end piece...I absolutely LOVE it!)

I took my little bottle of white acrylic craft paint and dry-brushed it on. To achieve that look just put paint on a dry brush and paint off most of it on the newspaper.  Then take what little remains on your paint brush and paint the wood.

You don't have to use "old" wood.  You can actually "age" the wood.  I did a similar technique on my Paintstick Crate if you'd like to see how to "age" new wood!

Next, I just used painter's tape to mark off my flag shape. 

I left the distressed white as my flag stripes.  I also went over the entire flag with some tea-stained distressing ink just to age it some more.

I took twine that I already had and wrapped it around the ends to give it a little "somethin' somethin'!"

The best part....it was FREE!  Absolutely free!  I recycled something ugly that I already had and never used to make something pretty and fun!!

What have you been recycling??

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