Wooden plate chargers

I showed you the sneak peek yesterday and I thought I'd go in a little deeper on how I made the wooden plate chargers from the rustic tablescape post.

First of all, these are all the ladies at Shanty-2-Chic's idea. They're the geniuses behind these, I just put my own spin on it. ;) Let's just get that out in the open first shall we? We shall.

They painted theirs with a stencil, which is fabulous but instead of painting on snowflakes I thought it would be fun to reverse it a bit and have the wood be the focal point.

First up, stain. I used ebony first and it was too dingy looking for this, so I switched to walnut. See the difference? The ebony is great for the aged looking color that's totally in right now but wasn't warm enough for the look I was going for. :) Oh, and don't bother getting a whole can of stain if you don't already have some laying around. I got the 2.00 tiny pot of it and it was more than enough.

Once it's applied and wiped off and dried long enough it's time to put on the stickers. I used two packs of foam snowflakes from Michaels. If I were doing it again I would have gotten a few more packs, so I could use more big flakes. They had three different sizes and the small ones were very abundant in the pack. ;) Oh well, next time.

Instead of doing all snowflakes I thought it would be fun to switch it up and also do three striped chargers.

This gets fun.

I didn't want to go into measuring them so I just started taping different widths of stripes. Slim, thick it didn't really matter and it wasn't perfect and I'm 100% okay with that. Because, they turned out great I think. Plus it saved me a lot of time and sanity not worrying about measuring, but if that part doesn't bother you go ahead and measure! They'd look cute with perfect stripes or even chevron if you wanted to get really detailed with cuts and taping off. MMM chevron..

Anyway.. I spray painted right over the tape and stickers, trying my best to spray straight down and not angled so it wouldn't by any chance get under the stickers.

I swore I took a during photo but it's MIA so you get the idea. Paint..dry..paint..dry.. Then the fun part. Pulling off the stickers! Oohh, ahh! Love them. I distressed it some more and that's about it! I'd love to put a glossy clear coat on them but didn't have any in my stash.

Easy peasy! Thanks to the Shanty chicks for letting me run with their idea, check them out.. They rock the socks. :) Now go make some!

Tie some bakers twine around a stack of them and you have a perfect handmade Christmas gift!