Pretty up your clothespins

I'm like a lot of people in that I REALLY love my clothes dryer so you might be asking why I would need pretty clothespins. Well, I'll tell ya, I use them to hang up my son's artwork on a tension line I hung up on his wall.

I was having a crummy morning so I went in search of a craft I could do with materials on hand that would pretty up my surroundings a bit and I landed on embelishing the clothespins in his room. I only did a handful of them in the first batch but plan to do them all. Despite O having dropped my beloved SLR, I managed to take a few pictures along the way so I could create a little tutorial in case you want pretty clothespins too. I actually hesitated to create this post when I realized how flat my photos look but I wanted to share this tutorial so I did it anyway.

First I grabbed my box of paper scraps and I cut a bunch of strips of paper 1cm wide using my paper cutter. I also gathered my bare clothespins, scissors, mod podge, a paint brush, a hole punch (it was actually already out so I figured I'd use it) and some embelishments (not pictured here):

Next, take one of the clothespins and lay one of your strips of paper down on it holding it with one hand and creasing the end with the other to get the right length.

Clip the paper at the crease. Now spread Mod Podge on the clothespin and stick down the paper. I did this with 8 clothespins before I went back to embelish each one.

That Mod Podge dries fast! After taking the picture I went back in and embelished each clip except the candy corn paper one because I liked that one just the way it was. I coated the paper with mod podge and stuck down sparkles, stars, feathers and paper.

These took me about 10 minutes of actual work (longer to take pictures though). I do wish I wasn't using my webcam for these shots as I think some of their sparkle falls flat but the SLR will be in the shop for a few days getting fixed. Anyway, here they are in action:

If you try this craft, I'd love to see your pictures. You can send a link to your blog or just your pictures to buildsewreap at gmail dot com.


Thank you for reading