12 Days of Christmas Crafts: Pegboard Canvas

For the last few occasions and holidays I have made very minor alterations to my mantle, but I wanted to do something bigger for Christmas.  My challenge was that the art on the mantle and the ceiling above are large, anything I wanted to put up had to be big. 

Thanksgiving mantle

I thought about a large mirror or canvas, but all of the options I came up with were expensive.  The plan was inexpensive and easy.  Then, I saw a piece of pegboard sitting around and started imaging a vintagey, maybe subway art look....and this is what I came up with:

I purchased a sheet of pegboard from Home Depot for $17.  They only come in 4x8 there ( you can get them smaller elsewhere), but I asked them to cut it to 2 - 4x4s.  I chose a red that is a little rustic, but still Christmas-y.

sorry, blurry - Rustoleum American Accents in Colonial Red

I gave the pegboard one good coat.  I let it dry for approximately 24 hours in the garage.

I downloaded some cute fonts from dafont.com (I LOVE this website!).  For this project I used Legend M54 and Riesling.  I'm happy to email the pdf file if anyone wants to use it.  I'm not very confident in my freehand ability so I used a projector to trace it onto the pegboard.

Laying out the spacing from the projector was definitely the hardest part of this project. I used an almond color crayon to trace it as I was using CeramCoat ivory paint to paint the letters.

 I laid an old sheet under the pegboard on the floor instead of painting it upright and risking that the paint would drip down through the holes or the front of the board.

I painted only one coat using a small brush for the edges and a foam brush to fill.  I was able to place it on the mantle within a few hours of completing it.  Since I aready had the paint, the only cost was the pegboard.  Not bad for $8.50!