Magnolia Mamas : DIY American Flag Pallet {Tutorial}

Monday, June 29, 2020

DIY American Flag Pallet {Tutorial}

We recently put in a fence and when all of the supplies were delivered to our house the concrete for the fence posts came on a pallet. The Mr. had the idea to turn that pallet into an American flag and I loved the idea! I looked up a few different tutorials online and ended up with a game plan. I love the way it turned out and happy that I finished it just in time for the 4th of July!

As promised on Instagram stories, I thought I would share a tutorial in case anyone else has access to a pallet and looking for a project!

The first step was to prep the pallet. Our slats were spaced apart, but I decided that I liked the look of them being closer together. I started to take them off and it was taking me forever so the Mr. took over this part of the project and worked much faster than I did. He took them off of both sides and then nailed them all onto one side closer together.

At this point I sanded it down a bit, but left it pretty rough because I liked the rustic feel of it and didn't want it to be too perfect. Next the kids and I spray painted the entire pallet white and when it dried I used painters tape to tape off where I wanted the stripes. This obviously doesn't have the correct number of stripes as the real flag, but I wanted to use each slat as a stripe to make it easier to paint. I just made sure there was a red one on the top and at the very bottom.

Up first were the red stripes!

Next I adjusted the tape a bit so I could paint the blue part and left the tape on what would be the white stripes so it didn't overspray too much.

Finally I was ready for the stars. I debated several ways to do this, but ultimately ended up making my own stencil. It was easy to do using any word processing program. You simply open a new document, go to Insert, then Shape, and finally Star.

I just copied and pasted the stars until I got them arranged in the pattern I wanted and printed it out. Then I used a straight edge razor and a ruler on a cutting board to cut out each star. It took forever, but was so worth it in the end!

I taped the stencil down and used white acrylic paint with a sponge paint brush.

I ended up having to move my stencil around after each section dried several times to get all 50 stars because I was worried about the paint smudging. I could have avoided this and painted them all at once, but that would have meant cutting out more stars.

Originally, I was going to put the flag on our screened porch, but ended up putting it down on our patio because I have so many other red, white, and blue things down there right now for summer.