Photo Hanger made from a Thrift Store Find-DIY

I hope you all are having a great summer.  Ours has been busy, but there are days when my kids are “SO BORED”.  That’s when my mama creative brain gets going and I try to make some fun things happen for my kids, like this Under the Sea Play Date.

Well, my 14 year old daughter has been wanting something to hang her pictures with, on her wall in her bedroom. She enjoys photography, and seeing her pictures and things she has created, is uplifting to her. I thought this could be a project we could work on together so she won’t be so bored.

What she described that she wanted, made me think of this type of contraption

from Amazon .(affiliate link)

I think this photo hanger is fine and dandy for some people, but I like to be unique and make my own home decor with my own style, I love shabby chic/farmhouse style, and I felt like we could come up with something cute. The wheels in my head began to turn, and I got super excited to be making something for my daughter’s room.

I recently joined a group of bloggers as a co-host of “Ispire My Creativity”. Each month we will be sharing some kind of creation that goes along with a theme.  This month the theme is Thrift Store Makeover and I decided that this little project would be perfect for this link party.

I thought we could go to our local thift store and look for two somethings to put on either end, then have some kind of string, ribbon or lace to hang between the two somethings.  Then we could get some mini clothes pins to hang the pictures with- a simple and unique project to make my girl smile.

I was hoping we could find some kind of matching small corbells or wooden figures for the ends… Yeah, THIS is what we came away with. 

I have no idea what in the world it is, but it just sparked something in me and we decided to go for it.  The cashier called it a wind chime (if you

hold it on one end and let it hang, it creates this long spiral thing that, I guess, could look cool spinning in the wind- Hey maybe it’s a wind SPINNER!-darn I wish I would have taken a picture of it hanging) and since it didn’t have a price tag, she decided it was $1.50.  Not quite what I was thinking, but a good start to a cheap photo hanger.

My thought for this was to cut it in half and twist each section together, creating a sea urchin looking thing. These will be our ends of the photo hanger.

So, I snipped it in half with tin snips and took it outside and spray painted them.  Once they were dry, I plugged in my large glue gun and cut a rectangle of card board to glue each one to.  I twisted each one tight and put a bunch of glue on the back to hold it together and put it onto the cardboard.  I then squeezed some glue down into the middle where it looked like glue would be helpful in keeping it together.

**Now, my back-up plan to the hot glue, if it didn’t work, was liquid nails.  But lots of hot glue worked just fine and I was glad I didn’t have to go out in the garage in seach of our liquid nails.

After the hot glue dried and I was sure that it was well secured I put some 3M command hanging velcro strips  on to the back of each cardboard rectangle and then to the wall.  I love these because I hate making holes in my walls with nails and these work great, hanging items that aren’t too heavy.

After getting the two side pieces up, we tied some fun string and lace to those, for the pictures to hang from with mini clothes pins. 

My daughter gathered some of the pictures she wanted to hang and here it is.  The finished work of art.  I hope this has inspired you to make your own picture hanger out of something unique and different, adding your own personality to a room.

SEE THE HAPPY!

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