Challenge Accepted!

I have a confession to make…I. Love. Pinterest. There, I said it. I’m a total addict when it comes to Pinterest. An online inspiration board for all the things I see that I want to hang onto? I now have a place for all those “Martha Stewarts guide to tying perfect bows” –type tutorials?! Yes please! I could literally spend hours and hours (and hours and hours) pinning and repinning. That’s right, you can repin the stuff other people are out there pinning. *singing* Looove iiiiit! Like I said, *points at self* totally hooked.

Recently, Sherrie at Younghouse Love (fabulous blog…John & Sherrie are my DIY heroes) announced her 2nd Pinterest Challenge (details here). I’ve pinned many, many projects I’d like to try, but have only done a few. The point of Pinterest Challenge is to turn us “pinners” into “doers” and then share. So I pinned and then I did. So now I’m sharing. :) My project wasn’t earth-shattering, but it was fun and festive and I love it!

I decided to try my hand at making a Thanksgiving banner similar to this one I pinned by Kate at Centsational Girl:

Are you ready for it?

Ta-da!

Sorry for the bad lighting, but I didn’t get finished with it until after it had gotten dark.

I forgot to take pictures of how I did everything (go figure), but I can tell you how I did it. I cut the template for the bigger triangle out of a piece of 5x7” card stock and then cut the smaller triangle from the middle of the bigger one 1/2” in on all sides. Then I cut the larger triangles from 3 different colors of Thanksgiving-y/Fall-ish card stock. For the letters, I printed them off on, you guessed it, more card stock. Instead of the word “thankful” I decided to go with “give thanks.”

You can’t see it in this picture, but I embossed the letters with clear embossing powder to give them a fun little “extra something.” After I finished embossing the letters, I cut out the smaller triangles and then used an ink pad around the edges to give them sort of an antique-y feeling. The kids helped me glue the triangles together and then I punched holes in all the corners and tied them all together with brown ribbon. We used some leaves the kids found outside and a sprig of rose hips that I cut from the back yard.

But there it is! Our first official Thanksgiving decoration! Yippee!  The best part is, aside from the ribbon, I already had everything on hand. So this only cost $1.30! See, Honey? Something good does come from my incessant pinning! ;) It was a fun project that I was able to do with the kids in my own control-freak-ish kind of way. And we all loved the end result! Happy Fall, everyone! :D

XOXO,