How To: Make Your Own Old Glory

View Full Album

Hello dear friends,

My how I’ve missed you. I have had so many posts in my head over the past few weeks that I have really been wanting to share with you. I wanted to get this one in before Independence Day. I’ll try to quickly crank it out. Here goes…

This post is a little project I’ve been working on for probably a month. I have only had snippets of down time here and there between work and class assignments. Lately, I’ve been filling them with painting.

Last summer I did a post about some items from Pottery Barn that I thought would be cute for Judd’s parents’ farm. One of them was this.

I thought it would be so cute to paint a true-to-scale flag to hang on the porch. I think the PB one was made of wood. But, I knew we had lots of old tin stored in the barn from when the roof was replaced. I asked my father-in-law if he would mind for me to take a piece home to paint. He thoughtfully obliged and even helped me to pick out a piece that was already cut to the right size.

I used the following items to create my flag.

• tin
• f0am stars
• Rustoleum white spray paint
• red, blue, and white acrylic paint
• painter’s tape
• small paint brushes

Luckily, the tin and paint were things I already had. I found the stars and painter’s tape at Wal-mart. I created this whole project for only a few bucks.

First, I cleaned the tin with a damp cloth and let it dry. Then, I took the tin outside and spray painted the entire front side with a few coats of white Rustoleum paint. When the paint was dry I brought it back in and put it on my dining room table. It’s just way too hot in Alabama to do anything outside for very long. :)

Next, I measured the flag in order to make sure I could fit 13 even stripes from top to bottom. My stripes were about 2” apart. I put down painter’s tape over the stripes that I wanted to remain white. I started from the bottom because I knew I needed six stripes underneath the stars.

Once the bottom stripes were marked off, I began using my foam stars as templates to make sure I could evenly align and fit the 50 stars. The stars had a peel-off sticky backing. Because the tin was corrugated the stars didn’t stick down perfectly; however, they did adhere enough to stay in place while I held them down and painted around them one by one.

When the stars were in place I added some tape along their right edge. Then I carefully painted several layers of navy paint around each star.

Once the navy paint was dry, I removed the stars. I used a small paintbrush and some white paint to touch up just a few little areas. Voila, 50 white stars. Note, this picture was before the touch-ups of white paint.

Then, I taped off the rest of the stripes and filled in the untaped areas with several layers of red paint.

This was after the first layer of paint.

This was after about 4 or 5 layers of paint. Just call me Betsy Ross.

What do you think? I can’t wait to put it to good use.

Judd and I wish you and yours a very fun and safe Independence Day.