Make This Hotel Key Sign

 



Make This Hotel Key Sign
I get a little stir crazy in the wintertime. I miss working on my porch: scraping, sanding, painting. But while Old Man Winter hangs on in these last few days, I can still do a few smaller, indoor projects. Here is one I've been working on.

I freely admit I totally stole this idea from one I saw on Etsy/Pinterest. I just fell in love with the vintage look and the many, many hooks for hanging necklaces, bracelets, keys, scarves.


Of course, I had to give it my own unique touch. In this case, I added a hotel sign to the top of the board and a few tags for the little metal tag-plates.

The board itself was made from reclaimed pallet wood (thanks to the amazing HUBBY!). He cut the pallet wood and assembled it. Next, I lightly painted it a creamy latex white, leaving the wood grain to show through. Then I went over it with some watered down black acrylic paint for an old, gray tint.

I added the hooks and labels, pretty much eye-balling it (I'm not great with measuring/numbers/simple math.) But I did attempt to space it out evenly using my handy-dandy fabric tape measure. Hey, if I'm a little off... it just adds to the charm, right? :) I painted lightly over the hardware, letting some of the black show through for a chippy look.

The black tag plates/label/card holders were from Amazon. The hooks were from Walmart hardware section.

The brown tags were made from gluing brown mailing paper to cardstock. Then I wrote out some French words (Google
translator) and numbers, as in room numbers.

Tim Holtz idea-ology makes these cute little ceramic style number plaquettes, which would also work great on this sign. I used one on a key.

The "Hotel Paris" at the top was inspired by a design I saw on Pinterest. I painted a very thin board black, then colored on it with a wax Easter egg crayon. Any wax will do, though, I think, even a white crayon. Next, I painted over that with white and then used a scraper to scrape the edges. The wax keeps the top coat of white from sticking, so it can be scraped away, revealing the black paint beneath, giving the sign a cool, vintage look. I printed out the words, colored the back of the paper with willow charcoal (Walmart art section) and then traced the words onto the sign and filled them in with paint. When they were dry, I hand-sanded just a bit for a worn look.

Put it all together and ta-da! I have a pretty little French-ish hotel key sign! Lovely!

 

 

 

Next up, see how I transformed an old wooden bench!