The DH and I are well on our way to WV for a quick skiing trip with a friend of ours, but I wanted to quickly post about a Paper Crafting project I completed shortly after the holiday season this year.

Pretty much the entire month of January is the perfect time to stock up on all of your Christmas decorating/crafting supplies. This year I was able to take advantage of some sick sales at Michaels and Target so I'm hoping to have some fun projects to complete at the beginning of the holiday season this year. Before all of our Christmas decorations went back into the attic for their yearly slumber, I finished decorating some Christmas-y wooden letters. I picked up the wooden letters from my local Michaels store after I had decided what word I wanted to decorate. I went with 'JOY' since it was short, and this was my first attempt at this! I'd like to point out before I get into the nitty-gritty details that this project can be done for pretty much any holiday. You could create these letters for Valentines day spelling out the word 'LOVE', or Thanksgiving with 'THANKS', or just as an every day decoration for a nice nook in your kitchen with 'EAT' or something along those lines!

I started off by sanding (a must!) and painting the wooden letters red. Then I picked out some Christmas scrapbook paper in coordinating colors. Once the letters were dry I flipped each letter upside down and placed them on the back side of each scrapbook paper. Then I traced around each letter with a pencil. I turned the scrapbook paper upside down to trace on so that there wouldn't be any pencil marks on the pretty side of the paper on my finished product. Don't ask me how I came to this brilliant conclusion, I don't want to talk about it. After all the letters were all traced, I carefully cut out each one.

Then came the fun part; well fun to me at least!! I don't know if I've been living in a cave all my life, but I just recently discovered Mod Podge! Crazy, I know! I first put a generous layer of Mod Podge right on to the portion of the wooden letter where I'd apply my paper. Very quickly, I placed the cut out paper letter onto the space I had just applied Mod Podge. I very carefully smoothed out any bubbles and made sure the paper was covering every inch of the painted wooden letter. After I felt confident the Mod Podge had dried, I applied another generous amount of Mod Podge right on top of the paper I had just secured down. I ended up doing a few extra coats on the letters and applied the Mod Podge to the entire letter, not just where the scrapbook paper was to give it a nice shiny look. I waited until the next day to start decorating the letters to make sure all of the thick coats of Mod Podge had plenty of time to dry.

The letters can be decorated with as little or as many embellishments as you'd like, but I went with a minimalist look and hot glued down some Christmas ribbon and snow flake brads. Here's the finished product! I think I'll make more of these this holiday season and give them out as gifts to family members and friends.

Breaking down the cost of this project: Each of the wooden letters were less than $2 each at Michaels. The scrapbook paper, ribbon, and brads were left over from making my Christmas cards this year, so that was free. Total project cost if I had to estimate how much the paper, ribbon, and brads would have cost would probably be around $10.