Sustainable Art | DIY Stir Stick Art
You read that right… I made a this beautiful art piece for my dining room using predominantly paint stir sticks and couldn’t be happier with the outcome!
Materials Used
2 - 24”x48” MDF Boards from Home Depot
3 - 8’ long 1”x1/2” trim (primed trim is GREAT)
Chop Saw
Wood Glue
5 Packs of long paint stir sticks from Home Depot (3 pack)
5 Packs of short paint stir sticks from Home Depot (10 pack)
Small Foam rolled for applying paint to boards
Chalk Paint
Small Paint brush for painting trim and stir sticks
Paint for trim and sticks
Wood Stain
**Colors and such should all be personal preference! Have fun with it!
I had this idea a while ago…. I had been saving these two 24x48 beautiful boards that I used for my wedding for almost 5 years now. They definitely had a sentimental element for me, but I’m not one for holding onto things forever that aren’t serving a purpose, so I figured it was time for them to finally find an actually place in our home.
**You can buy these 24”x48” MDF boards at Home Depot for under $20 a piece. The trim is less that .98 cent a linear foot and I just used a chop saw to cut them to fit as a frame.
Because the boards were already painted in chalkboard paint, I decided to cover the text with the same thing. For the frame, I went with Benjamin Moore’s Black Beauty since I already have so much of it around my house and had some laying around.
And here is where the magic happens!!! I used roughly 5 packs of the large stir sticks that I had from Home Depot and 5 packs of the smaller ones. Using a chop saw, I cut the sticks into varying lengths and started to lay them out in a design. I put the two boards together so I could easily match them up in order to have an exact butterfly match, one side being light and one side being dark.
After that - on the light side - I left some of the pieces natural, stained some with a whitewash, and painted the others with Benjamin Moore’s Simply White. For the dark side, I painted some Benjamin Moore’s Black Beauty, and stained the others a combination of dark walnut and ebony. Wa la! Only thing left to do was use some good ol’ fashioned E600 and get to glueing! I did only one side at a time and did the three separate groupings one by one so that I could keep the two sides identical.
All in, this project cost me under $50!!! I’ve gotten so many compliments and anyone can create a piece like this. I can’t wait to get my hands on another project with items I’ve got laying around. Better on my walls than in a landfill after all.
Thanks so much for stopping by and Happy Designing!
heather-scherie
