So I started this blog a long time ago and only managed to write one post.  My bad.  In my defense, between working on our home, our wedding, going on our honeymoon and getting settled back into a routine (as newlyweds!!!) time has gotten away from me even more than it normally does.  I figured that I would talk about my favorite wedding craft… our card box!

I, like many brides-to-be, spent a lot of time swooning on Etsy at all of the beautiful handmade items that might just add a special air of whimsy or romance to my big day.  I absolutely LOVE anything that displays a whimsical quote or something of the like, so when I saw a rustic, weathered card box that read “Every Love Story is Beautiful But Ours Is My Favorite” on the front, I was sold.  Then… I saw the price.  I started looking around and found that most of the card boxes I was finding online ranged from around 80 bucks all the way up to 250 bucks for more intricate designs.  I was shocked!  The one I fell in love with was listed for around 115 dollars.  Despite shelling out the big bucks for certain parts of our budget (we dropped more on photo and video than I was able to scrounge up for a down payment for my car just a few short years ago) I was not going to go overboard on unnecessary details.  I’ve never been a particularly artsy person but I decided to hit up the craft store and see if I could make my own version for a more reasonable cost.  It was, admittedly, the first crafty DIY project I’ve ever taken on (at least in my adult life!).

I will lay this out up front:  it still wound up being somewhat expensive for the supplies, which included the wood box and materials to do the “rustic glaze” that I found on the super helpful blog post below:

http://www.prettyhandygirl.com/how-to-make-new-wood-look-old-weathered-and-rustic/

The glaze calls for 4 parts Valspar clear mixing glaze, 2 parts of the mocha glaze and 1 part of the antiquing asphaltum glaze.   I actually just searched google images for the quote, and found a picture of a sign I liked.  I originally intended on tracing the outline of the quote and then painting it, but soon discovered that I would have spent the rest of my life doing that, so ended up just eyeballing it.  It’s definitely imperfect and I would certainly have to fine tune my skills before opening up my own Etsy shop but I was very happy with the result.

The three glaze ingredients ran me about 43 dollars at Lowe’s (the only place I could find Valspar products) and I didn’t have time to shop sales, look for coupons or any of the other tips and tricks I would normally employ.  The wood box was 19.99 and the acrylic paint for the text was about a dollar, so all in all I spent around 65 bucks- but I have enough rustic glaze to weather pretty much anything I could think of.  So it looks like I have to craft some more… the next project I would like to tackle is refinishing a garage sale coffee table my husband picked up years ago for about 15 bucks- so hopefully I will be posting the end result of that in the near future!

Despite the investment in the ingredients being a little bit more than I would have originally anticipated, I have plenty of materials for future crafting (yay!) and, most importantly, the end result was beautiful (and we can display it in our home for years to come!).  All it took was a little elbow grease 😉