Wednesday's Window

     Every Wednesday is Wednesday's Window,  I will be featuring a new way to repurpose old windows.  I have seen so many great ideas out there.  I also have an abundance of windows, as I will explain in a minute. 
    So it all started some years ago when I saw an old wooden window that someone had taken these gorgeous black and white pictures iof thier children and put them in each of the panes.  So I came home and searched and searched for a window and finally found one, purchased it and its still sitting waiting for me to add the pictures.  Sigh...  In the meantime, my husand, the carpenter, installed some new windows for someone bringing home a huge load, or at least what I thought was a huge load at the time of old windows from an old plantation home.  We made all sorts of things out of them which I will show in later weeks.  Then another window job came in and another and another each time bringing home more and more windows.  The reason for the abundance of windows.  I've had all these dreams and hopes of what to do with them but lacked motivation, and quite overwhelmed with the quantity.  So I thought by featuring a new idea each week will motivate me to get something done with them.  We are also selling them as is if anyone is interested.

So this week I am featuring the bulletin board you see above.  For this project I started with a six pane window, the glass had broken on half of the panes already so it looked good to use for this. 

At first I just cut and put into place the cork board tiles ( found at Michaels, Walmart, etc), but that was waaay too plain, it needed some personality, also the cork board itself was just too thin, it needed some meat behind it.  So I thought I would stencil a design on there.  Don't you hate it when you have the idea of what you want in your head, you know you have seen it somewhere but can't find it?  Well that was me, I had this image of vines, leaves, flowers dancing around in my head.  I searched the internet for clipart, I searched fabric suppliers for a fabric swatch I could use for a design, I searched scrapbook papers, even bedding and could not find what was in my head.  So after drivng myself almost completely crazy I was walking through my sewing room and caught one of my clear stamps out of the corner of my eye.  That's it that will be perfect to make a stencil.

I found my ink pad and stamped it on a piece of paper, then blew it up on the printer, it took a few tries to get the right size.  Finally I was happy with the size and stuck some clear contact paper on top of the design. 

Then painstakingly cut around the image with an exacto knife to make my stencil. 

Placed the positive image (the piece you cut out) onto the cork board and painted all the tiles with celery green paint. 

Once the contact paper was removed, this is how it came out, not too good.  The image wasn't clear and it still needed more personality.  So back to the drawing board, I blew up the image one more time, it needed to be more bold to show up.  Cut it out again and placed the negative image on the tiles this time.  I needed a color to show up on the green, at first I was going to use white but my husband thought that was too boring and since I have been added little bits of red to my kitchen I thought red would be perfect. 

Here is a very blurry picture of the tiles before I put them in the window

I cut pieces of foam core to place behind the tiles to give them more meat, you could always use some sturdy cardboard also but I had an unused piece of foam core so I used that.  Taped them all into place and

Voila!!!

Here's the finished product.  I love that its the right mix of retro and modern.  I left the window frame as it to leave that old worn character. 

               

Praise God for YOU!!!

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