Shutters for Displaying Christmas Cards

Thank you to everyone who left me such wonderful comments on my rustic Christmas décor! I may not have been able to reply to all of you, but I DID read each and every comment! And thank you to the rest of you who took time out of your day to look at my post.

As promised, I am sharing with you the tutorial for creating the shutter screens that I display my Christmas cards on.

I am completely obsessed with decorating my home using shutters (only I use them on the inside instead of the outside!) I have one hanging in our half bathroom and two more in our upstairs hallway dressing up a dormer window. Luckily I still had two pairs laying around.

I began by attaching three hinges to hold a pair of shutters together.

I mixed two colors of red acrylic paint together (cadmium red medium & Lucas madder red) to get the perfect Christmasy red.

A perfect Christmas red is neither too orange nor too cranberry. It is very similar to Coca-Cola red.

Factoid: Did you know that Coca-cola red is so special that the company does not share the formula for the color?

Using a 2″ Purdy paint brush, I dabbed the brush into the paint and then wiped it off on the plate. Then dry brushed the paint onto the shutters, letting the bristles skip over the slats.

I kept dry brushing the shutter until I had enough paint for it to appear red, and yet some of the dark green color still peeked through.

Here is a close up of the green paint showing through:

Then I set each screen up in the corners of our living room and used clothespins to attach the cards.