Many moons ago, I’d made this decorative wall hanging/decor for our bathroom wall, using a piece of beach wood, air plants and string.
After successfully killing all of the air plants over the span of a year or so, the wood has hung empty for much, much too long 😅
Though I loved how it looked, I wasn’t about to purchase more plants. just to kill them :p
I’d notice the empty piece of wood while in the bathroom and then just as quickly forget about it…
Finally after a little thought and inspiration blossoming after Instagram/Pinterest scrolling, an idea formed.
I bought this ‘air drying clay’ from Walmart for around $5.00 and during one Sunday morning after we’d had breakfast and were listening to some preaching online, I got Mike to accompany me in making some clay shapes to begin the project.
I laid out parchment paper to roll the clay out on and used a variety of home items to cut out my desired shapes.
A small knife, some lids from these bead containers and a sewing needle to create the holes that would be used for assembly.
The clay began to dry out fairly quickly so I wouldn’t take off more than you need at one time… just so you know if you decide to attempt anything 🤓
You can see when the created pieces are dry, as they go from a grey color to more of a white… I didn’t time it and we rolled out pieces pretty thin but I didn’t find that it took crazy long.
What DID take long was installing a loop on each one, then arranging and rearranging the shapes until I found them to be mostly visually pleasing and used jewelry chain to attach them all in the correct order.
They then sat on my coffee table, in order, for probably over a week before I got up the ambition to actually paint them and complete the project 😬🙈 I have to be in just the right mood to actually ‘paint’ anything… anyone else?
I would have left them neutral but since the wall behind the piece is white, I decided to add some color.
I painted them and then used a damp paper towel and my nail to distress them a bit which gave it more of a beach feel to me, since I wasn’t going for perfection in my paint strokes anyways 😉
I used hot glue to attach the top of the chains onto the driftwood and some ‘quake putty’ on the back of some of the pieces to gently adhere the odd one to the wall, so they would lay flat.
I don’t know that it’s my favourite creation but honestly, it’s rare that I absolutely love a thing that I come up with 🤪
So, it’s better than nothing and I can see myself turning to clay more often in the future… maybe 😉
Now, after an embarrassingly long time, the stick on the bathroom wall no longer hangs empty 🙂
Jemstory 