Pallet Wood American Flag

A little later in the day than I normally post, but it's apparently it's Flag Day and I just so happened to have finished it last night!

It’s 100+ degrees this week so I wasn’t too motivated to go out and work on this one outside or in my garage, but I finished! Yeah!

So I started by ripping my pallets apart. For that I used a friend’s reciprocating saw (aka Sawzall) and cut the board apart. I’m no good at explaining – take a look at this tutorial on how to dismantle a pallet, awesome info!

Then with the boards separated I found the ones I wanted and attached them to a scrap piece with small screws just big enough to go through the scrap board and a little into the board itself from the back. I did it like that so I wouldn’t have screws showing in the front.

So it looks like this all put together. I gave the whole thing a pretty good sanding to prep it for painting. One word of wisdom – be picky with your pallets. This one was pretty junky, the wood was really horrible to paint. Take the condition of the wood into mind when picking up a pallet to use for art like this. The end of wisdom.

Then I studied very carefully the dimensions and proportions of the United States flag on Wikipedia. With my measuring tape, yard stick, and a pencil I measured and marked out the stripes and canton – or union- the blue part

After that I retreated out of the sun into the garage. Now we’re all friends, right? You’re not going to judge me by these photos of my garage and all the mess (aka an unfinished projects – or two), are you? Good…Then you may proceed.  

I got lots of help on this one. Ben felt it necessary to hammer it a bit more. Nice.

And Andrew wouldn’t let me do all the painting. I painted the outline and asked him to stay in the lines and he did. Works for me.

Coming along nicely…Oh and notice the bit at the bottom that’s not painted. Just a little extra that I cut off to keep the proportions in check.

So for the stars, I attempted to put something together on the computer to make it nice and exact or close to exact. Then I planned on rubbing chalk on the back and tracing the stars on, but, it was too small for the canton. So I scrapped this method.

Instead I scrounged up a glow in the dark star from my son’s room and used it as a stencil. Worked totally fine, just took more time and was a bit harder to get the spacing right.

It worked out though and I think it turned out pretty great!

Now to hang it. My husband really wants to hang a huge flag on the empty side of our house. I’m hoping this will fulfill that desire!

Check out more creative pallet ideas over here:

https://www.designrulz.com/product-design/2012/09/35-creative-ways-recycle-wooden-pallets/