DIY Wooden American Flag

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Memorial Day is Monday May 25th. It makes me think of the men in my family that proudly served our country. I decided that I wanted to make something that would honor my father and remember my maternal grandfather and father-in-law.

Honey Bee and I have been working on a project and on one of our MANY visits to our hardware store I found these stakes…

At first, I passed them by but then I glanced at the price tag. For a box of 12 pickets the cost was $3.47! Pretty great, right? At the time I didn’t even know what I was going to use them for – but then I came up with the idea of a wooden, rustic, antiqued flag. This is perfect for Memorial Day and Forth of July.

I got to work laying out my flag design…

I only needed to use eight of the stakes. Stay tuned next week to see the sign I made with the other four 🙂 I painted every other stake red.

Painting the left corner blue…

After the paint dried, I turned the pickets over. I used Gorilla Glue and paint stirrers to brace the back side of the pickets for stability.

**FYI** I had never used Gorilla Glue before. I didn’t realize that when the glue dried, it expanded. Well, I used too much glue and it expanded a lot and took on a life to its own. I also got glue on my hands which was very difficult to get off. I ended up using fingernail polish remover. **

When the glue was totally dry – after about two hours – I turned the flag over. I used a palm sander to distress the paint finish.

I printed out a star shape and heavily traced the outline with chalk…

I placed the chalk side down in the blue square area of the flag. I rubbed the chalk line well…

This gave a great outline for white paint placement…

I filled in the outline with white craft paint…

I let the paint dry…

I then gave a thorough coat of clear paste wax to the entire flag front…

Followed by a coat of dark wax. In my opinion, the dark wax gives an instant vintage look.

Here she is…all complete. I really love the rustic finish.

This project was fairly easy – minus the Gorilla Glue learning curve 🙂 My total cost was less than $3.47. I only used eight of the pickets and I had all of the other materials on-hand. The other materials were leftover from other projects. The glue I “borrowed” from Honey Bees cabinet 🙂

I thank and appreciate the military men and women whom protect me on a daily basis. I am proud to be an American!