A revamped Birdhouse

My son, Shawn, took a required woodshop class this fall as a freshman and after each project was finished he would bring it home and give it to me.   Ahh, what treasures!!  I LOVE the cutting board - my mom still has the one I made, so I know that his will last a long time too!   He also brought home a pretty cute whitewashed birdhouse.  I didn't want to hang it outside to rot in the rain - I wanted to be able to see it and keep it for a long time, and although it was whitewashed, it was still a little plain, so with his permission, I decided to decorate it!

Here's how he brought it home - simple, cute, a little shabby, and a little crooked ; )

and this is what I did to it:

First I used Idea-ology Tissue Tape - Market Place- on all of the raw edges.   Because the wood was painted, it stuck perfectly and it was SO easy to do!!  Then I started covering all of the other surfaces with Ideo-ology Paper Stash - Retro Grunge.   The paper was PERFECT for this project because several of the pieces have a wood grain pattern to them!!  It was really pretty easy but there were a few tricky parts because the house was NOT square!!  This is where the craft knife and sanding grip came in handy!!  I had it covered in no time!! I used the sanding grip to scuff up the paper just a bit, which brought out some of the roughness of the wood below. 

 

Then I went on to embellish it a bit!! I kept it fairly simple, but I still love the old country look. 

 

 

I had some old Prima sunflower vines that I thought would work perfectly!  I used the letters from Idea-ology Salvage Stickers to spell Fly, then the Idea-ology Adage Tickets for Soar, and the Idea-ology Muse Tokens says Forevermore - so basically it says "Fly, Soar, Forevermore"   (I really had NO idea what to spell, but I felt like Fly and Soar were sort of bird related..and then Forevermore sort of rhymed so I went with it! I'm TERRIBLE at word creativity!)  The bow is made from dyed seam binding - I used a variety of Ranger Distress Inks to create the color. 

Here's a few close-ups!

     

Pretty cool, right?  I LOVED how it turned out - so much that I've already started to cover the sconce!!

Stay tuned!!