Pottery Barn American Flag Knock Off

Sheet of plywood, cut down 27" x 50"

Spray paint FAIL

Have you seen the HUGE Wooden Pottery Barn American flag on their website?? Drools! I am LOVING it! With BBQ season and summer around the corner, I knew this was a piece I had to make for my home. It is HUGE at a whopping 50" long and 27" high! When I first showed my hubby this piece, he said "Where the heck are we putting that?" I didn't have an answer, I still don't. It is currently sitting in our garage while I debate hanging it on the porch or putting it inside of our home. To create our flag you will have to make a couple trips, one to a Home Depot or Lowes and the other to a Michael's or Hobby Lobby. I was tempted to make a smaller version of the flag, but knew I wouldn't be happy unless I KNEW it was the exact size as Pottery Barns. Imitation is flattery, right?

 Head down to your local HD or Lowes and head to the lumber section. For this flag you will need to purchase some plywood. You can't buy the super cheap, particleboard sheets because you are painting the whole thing and need wood grain to come through when you distress. The sheet we bought was around $25 and the nice man at Lowe's cut it down to 50" x 27" for me. (You do get all the scrap, which was about 3 more pretty big pieces for more projects later) You will also need to buy some painters tape, if you don't have some already. You will need some craft paint in our flag's colors, red, white and blue and 50 star stickers.No, you cant try and re use them to save $$$, it won't work!  I bought two red and blue bottles of craft paint, and actually used regular latex paint for the white I had sitting around at home.  Honestly, I tried spray painting the wood with white paint at first to save time and that was a FAIL! You could use spray paint, but it would take multiple cans worth! Luckily I have lots of paint left over from the plethora of projects I do around here and I was able to salvage it without any additional costs!  After my coat of white latex paint dried, I started adding my star stickers. I felt this was the easiest way to get uniform lines of stars for my flag, and it worked pretty well. I measured out about 2.25" between each star, horizontally and placed ALL 50 stars. PAIN! Then I taped off and covered the rest of the flag to apply my blue color. First I was lazy and used some blue spray paint I had on hand. Brilliant blue, and it was a little brighter than I wanted. So, I used some craft paint to add some dimension and darken the blue up a bit. It is VERY important that you remove the star stickers while the paint is still wet, otherwise the paint will peel and rip and be UGLY around your stars. For the most part all my stars came out pretty good. I touched up a few, but all in all I was pretty impressed.

Measure out your stars for placement.

Used 50 stickers.

Two paints I used.

Paint blue over all your stickers!

For the stripes I handed that over to my hubby. Because me and math don't mix...apparently neither do me and grammar. Haha.  He figured out the stripe measurements and taped it all off for me, so all I had to do was paint! Yipee!
I would suggest using a dark primer under the red, otherwise you will go through a lot of paint for your red stripes. Again, remove the tape white the paint is still wet. I did have some bleeding, but I was able to touch that up with paint later. I then used a 60 grit sander to distress the piece and added some dark walnut stain to the edges and in a couple spots on some red stripes for some dimension and character! This sign took A LOT of work and math, but the end result was well worth it! Stars & stripes forever!!!

{QoK}