A couple weekends ago, my aunt and uncle celebrated their anniversary and ventured out to Chi-town for a few days. My cousin Bonnie was house-sitting for them and wanted to make them something special. She had found a clock on some website (probably pinterest) and asked me if I'd help her make it.
Here's the original picture we were looking at
Lovely, isn't it? Alright. Clock hands, decal, pictures... seemed easy enough. Well, we had like 3 days to put this together. While Bonnie was perusing through pictures, I called the a few stores in my area to try to find this particular decal. Wanna know how to irritate a retail employee? Ask them for a very specific item. Man, it was like pulling teeth just to get someone to go look. After they played hot potato with the phone (I talked to like 4 different people) I finally got the answer I was dreading: They didn't have it. Since my relatives were only going to be gone a short time, we didn't have enough time to order it off of amazon or etsy. Well, crap. Alright, plan B! We make it. How hard could it be?
Turned out, it wasn't hard at all.
Acrylic paint and clear contact paper is all you need to make your own decals. It adds a nice homemade feel to it, not to mention it is significantly cheaper to do it this way ($4 at walmart.) Since the paper is clear, we just printed off the words and traced them in paint. Easy peasy.
Okay, so we've got the decals drying, pictures in their frames, time to start hanging. We wanted it to go in the stairway, they had a blank wall that was just screaming for a giant clock. Turns out this ended up being more complicated than we previously thought.
Reaching the spots where the pictures needed to go was quite terrifying. (That nail is PERFECTLY in the center!) Luckily, Bonnie handled the scary part ;). We did have a problem reaching the 11 though. It was just out of reach from the ladder and standing on tippy toes on the stairs. I ended up hoisting her son Ethan up onto my shoulders and he nailed it in.
He was so nervous, but he did it. Alright! We've got all the nails in the wall and pictures ready to go.
The clock is so huge! It was perfect! Now to add the clock and the decals.
The project took us all day, but it was so worth it. I didn't get to see my aunt's reaction when she got home, but Bonnie told me that she cried. It was definitely worth the hassle.
Now I've got a whole roll of clear contact paper to play with. How exciting! Thanks for reading :)
Until next time,
Cori
