Nautical Wooden Flag

Do you ever get house envy? I have a major case of it.  It is hard to move around every 6 months to a year and never feel settled in your house.  I see tons of blogs, magazines, TV shows on a daily basis that give me major house envy but there is one that literally makes me green.  Meet The Lettered Cottage and their reading room redo, or before and after pictures of several rooms in their house.  I love it.  White, clean, nautical, beachy, decorated but not overdone. 

How did I find this blog which led to my house envy you may ask?  I saw this post on one of my favorite blogs/websites (u-createcrafts.com) and I was in love. I found that post months ago and I finally created my wooden nautical flag today.  My living room is beach themed in honor of Maryland, my home state. 

But if you know me, you know I like short cuts because I do not like things that take a lot of effort. A few weeks ago my husband made our TV console and we had some extra plywood left over.  I had him cut a piece of that for me and used that to make my flag, instead of buying individual boards, painting them and then screwing them together (too much work!).

So here is what I did:

First I painted the entire board white. I used three coats of white that was watered down a little bit with water.

Then I used tape to set up where I wanted the stripes. I put down three pieces of tape and then removed the middle piece so that the white space was showing. I did this up the entire board. I painted the white sections with two coats of aqua/grey paint. I used two parts aqua and one part grey.  I removed the tape and let it dry.  The blue bled out in some places so I just used a Q Tip and went over those spots with white paint.

I then used some sandpaper and distressed the blue stripes in some places. Then I hot glued on 9 starfish. I like the white starfish from the original blog but I think the orange ones stand out more and that is what they had at Hobby Lobby.

And there is my flag! My flag has more stripes than the original because the tape I had was 2.5 inches wide. Maybe one day I will get my cameras working since all of my blogs since March have used pictures taken with my phone!