Wood Plus Stain Equals Art Tutorial

I feel as though I could start every single post with the sentence, "I was looking at Pinterest recently and...."  I spend entirely too much time on that amazing site (by the way, check out my boards on pinterest) but I love being awed and wowed and inspired by the amazing things I see there. All summer I kept noticing fabulous art created by pallets people were finding. After staining them and painting quotes or silhouettes, those free pieces of wood became beautiful.

I was torn by these beauties. You see, I desperately wanted to make some art with wooden planks but, as a former manager of a store that used thousands of pallets a week, I saw what most planks are coated with, how unsanitary they are treated, and how disgusting many of them are. I did not want to bring disease-invested wood into our home so I decided to find another way to create some free wooden plank art.

Enter paint stir sticks. I had a handful of these awesome, crafty sticks leftover from a previous project and pulled them out of the closet. They were perfect for what I had in mind!

After cutting off the beveled edges and picking out the most interesting sticks, I was left with the perfect little square of wood.  Taking some leftover stain from our branch bench (check it out here), I stained each stick. I wanted to stain them separately rather than all together once they were attached to one another in order to get a varied and non-uniform stain. My goal was to make this look as rustic and plank-like as possible.

The stain went on beautifully - check out the personality that little paint stir sticks can have.

Once they were dry, I used gorilla glue to glue the scraps I had sawed off earlier. 

Waiting 2 hours for the glue to dry was torture but I used the time to decide what I wanted to paint on my lovely canvas.

Now I have my very own faux pallet art!  Oh, and while working with the paint stir sticks, I started a couple more projects...stay tuned to see what else I can make out of these free pieces of wood!