Try it OR Ditch it... Spoon Decor

We can sit on pinterest all day long pinning home decor DIY and every time we go to do one we think is this even going to work or is this a waste of time and material? I bet you have asked yourself that same question. Well we are here to help. Our goal is to test out those DIY pins and see if they are easy enough for the average person to do. Sooo here is the first Try it OR Ditch it!

We have been looking for some wall art for a particular spot in our house which seems like years now (maybe a couple months). We found this picture on pinterest and KNEW it would be perfect for that spot. Turns out that spot wasn't so great after all... BUT we found an even better place for it to call home. We started off at our local Wal-Mart in hunt of CHEAP wooden spoons, and lo and behold we found extremely dirt cheap wooden spoons, 88 cents for 4. Crazy good deal right? They only had 10 packs left at the store so we bought them all and crossed our fingers that it would be enough. We made sure to do self check out so we didn't look completely crazy buying 40 cheap spoons(but it is Wal-Mart).

We also needed wood stain that we happened to have lying around in the garage, and black and red acrylic paint that we had in our craft room. To start off we laid out the spoons in the pattern depicted in the picture, and realized our longest spoon was way too long. We first tried to cut the spoons with a saw, but that proved to be too difficult for us... so we grabbed the nearest bread knife and chopped off the ends about 4 inches. After hacking the bottoms off, the ends were less then pretty, so we sanded the bottoms down using general purpose sand paper. Then we set about the task of separating out the spoons into piles one that would not be stained at all, one for a medium stain, another for dark stain, and one for a red stain. For the medium stain we used paper towels and dipped into the stain and rubbed it into the spoons pulling off most of the color but leaving some behind. For the darker stain we repeated that same process but added a small amount of black paint in with the stain and rubbed it in (very fast). For the red stain we repeated what we did with the darker stain but with red paint instead of the black. After that was completed we tried to let the spoons dry but we were too impatient and began the next step after only a few minutes. Somehow we luckily didn't get the stain on anything. The next step is to plug in your hot glue gun(get that bad boy ready). We then began to glue the spoons in the same pattern as the picture shows while burning the crap out of ourselves. We would suggest avoiding the burning part. After gluing 4 or 5 together the spoons kept falling off so we decided to glue them in intervals of 4. After all the spoons were glued and our skin was nice and burned we found a 1X4 (which was an old bed slat) and placed the spoons on top of the slat.

The slat was around 5 inches too long so we busted out a manly tool that we were deathly afraid of, a Sawzall. After a few tries we successfully cut it off 6 inches... Whoops. We thought it would be a good idea to drill screws into the spoons to attach them to the 2X4, but after searching and searching and blaming each other we couldn't find the drill and thought a powered screw driver would work just as good(hmmm doesn't sound too smart right?) it wasn't. The powered screw driver was not strong enough and cracked one of the spoons. After searching some more we ended up hot gluing the spoons to the 2X4 and burning ourselves some more. The glue held the spoons great! We now have a great a piece of art work to hang in our kitchen area. So try it or ditch it? we say try it but be very cautious, we are now sporting third degree burns!