Hello Sweet Friends.

Today, I am so excited, honored and giddy that this fun flag we made two years ago is competing in the Ultimate Summer Bash at BHG.com this week.

Did I really just say that? Pinch me now please!

I am going up against three incredibly talented ladies in the DIY category.

I would be so incredibly thankful and appreciative if you voted for our flag.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE

Oh, and if you want, you can vote every hour this whole week!

And since this is the project being voted on, I thought I would share the tutorial today.

It was part of our summer mantel that was a fun project to put together.

We obviously started with the bats. I bought then at an auction for another purpose that didn’t work out.

When I came up with the idea for this project, from the beginning I knew the problem would be cutting the bats in half. This picture below is the only one I have – because before Hubby turned anything on – I left – in fact I went out of ear shot (but still close enough in case there was a problem). Turns out my nervousness was putting a lot of pressure on him so I was asked volunteered to leave :).

So, this is what I will say about this step –it is dangerous, you must know what you are doing and you must have the proper equipment. I am not going to provide any how-to’s on this step because I am not qualified to do so. I am in no way recommending how to do this or to do it all. Maybe there is a woodshop locally that could do it for you? Yeah, I would probably be asked to leave your workshop also – sorry Nervous Nellie here.

I will say to cut them (with whatever method you choose) so that the text on the bats faces out evenly on the one side.

Anyway, once the bats are cut – you need a piece of plywood.

It does not need to be smooth because the rough texture can work to your advantage. I lined the bats up into the pattern that I wanted and then hubby cut down the plywood for me from there.

Then I stained the plywood with a dark stain I had in our garage. Any dark stain would work.

Then I dry brushed white paint. I happened to have a small amount of Annie Sloan chalk paint around so I used that (Old White). I made sure to allow plenty of the stain to show through and for the texture of the plywood to appear. I wanted to make sure there was enough white for the bats to pop off the background, yet still had the rustic aspect of the stain showing through.

You can see in the top of the picture I also stained the square strips that we used to make the frame.

Sorry for the shadows, but on this day I was really holding on the sun.

Hubby started the finishing nails before we placed in on the plywood so it would be easier to apply them.

We also added some liquid nails to really make sure it held.

Once the frame was completed – we brought it into the garage so it could be left in place for a few days to dry. I again used liquid nails to attach the bats.

We had shortened three of the bats to allow for the “star” section and used of the end pieces to frame out that section.

Once everything was in place, I left it for a few days. There was one bat that just would not attach – it had a slight bow to it and even after clamping it, it didn’t seem to hold. I used Gorilla Glue on that one and that seemed to work well. I am sure that would have worked from the beginning as well.

There have been a few comments in blogland about it not being enough stripes and stars. That is correct, it is not, we tried to get the proportions as close as we could but we were limited by the size of the bats.

We also had originally planned to cut baseballs in half and use that instead of stars.

We have learned the cutting a baseball in half is rather difficult, however we did succeed with one. When we placed it on, we weren’t loving it. That is when we decided to try the starfish. We loved it so much since it paired up all of our loves of our beautiful country, baseball and the beach.

What is more summer than that?

However, I do think it would be really fun with the baseballs – the stars just worked better for our space.

So, we have had a few inquiries about selling these flags – maybe – we are looking into it!

Thanks so much for stopping by!