I LOVE Holidays! I LOVE decorating!  I LOVE making things out of wood!  And I LOVE changing things up!  So ever since I saw this tutorial a couple of years ago, I have wanted to make one.  I finally had the time (and my own saw) to make it.  I followed the tutorial but with a few changes.

Instead of using one large piece of bead board, I found bead board slats and cut them to the length I wanted and then glued them together.  I did not do this as perfectly as I would have liked and now that I have done it once, I could do it much better a second time around.  But lets be honest.  I never get around to a second time, I always move on to the next project.   So it is good enough.

I also couldn’t find any roof flashings, which is what the tutorial uses for the metal magnetic part.  I don’t even know what they are.  And neither did the lovely people that work at Home Depot.  Every Home Depot employee I asked stared back at me blank faced. So instead I wandered around the store with a magnet looking for flat pieces of square metal.  I found one that was 12″ square, but I have no idea what it is actually for.  It was in the back of the store around the metal plate things that go over your heating vents.  Whatever those are called.  Anyway, I liked the nice even edges and I know from experience that cutting metal with perfectly nice straight edges is impossible, so I decided to keep it that size.  Which meant I decided to make bigger, more elaborate holiday pieces.  To cover more area.  No teeny tiny decoration on a huge piece of metal for me please.  Which means that I turned a 2 day project into a 2 week project.  Yay!  As Vu would attest, this is pretty much how every project of mine goes.  Why would I want to make things simple or easy?  Come on.  But I love the process and the result, so it works for me.  Even if Vu says we will never pay someone how much it would cost me (in time spent) to make it.  Which is also why Vu’s dream of retiring early to run my craft business will never come to fruition.

I also made a little frame around the metal, from some trim I cut, painted and distressed.  Because it needed a little something extra and I skipped the middle curvy piece from the tutorial.  I am really happy with how it turned out and I am excited to change it out every month.  Except in May.  Because I could not come up with something that I liked for May.  Anyone have any good suggestions?  The most common “symbol” for May is flowers and I didn’t want to do that because I really wanted to do tulips for April and I didn’t want to do flowers 2 months in a row.  So the tulips will stick around for May too.  Until I think of something else.  Which is kind of defeating the purpose of not making flowers for May.  Oh well.  For the holiday pieces I just drew my design, cut out the wood with my jigsaw, painted the wood, cut out scrap book paper to the design I wanted, then modge podged it onto the wood and attached magnets.  Like I said.  Two weeks!

Here they are.  Aren’t they beautiful?  At least I think so.

January and February

March and June

July and August

September and October

November and December

Those little tiny leaves were VERY hard to cut out and NOT cut off my fingers, but I LOVE them.  I wanted to make some more, but thought I might have been tempting fate so I left it for another day.  Maybe I will make some more when I decide what to make for May.