The Rumley Family

Quite a long time ago, I saw this post on MoneySavingMom, and filed it in my mental “To Do Someday, Maybe” folder.

Over time, I’ve just been stashing our extra TP rolls, and I bought some spray paint. And all of that sat in our school room closet for months.

But then! This past weekend I got a GREAT deal on canvases at Michael’s. They had their 2-packs Buy One Get One Free, AND I had a $5 off coupon. So, I spent $10.60 for FOUR 18″x24″ canvases.

And that was all the stimulus I needed!

To begin, here are the supplies I gathered:

empty TP rolls

ruler, Sharpie, scissors

hot glue gun and extra glue sticks

Then, I measured, marked, and cut one-inch segments on each TP roll.

Using the hot glue, I glued my pieces into four-point stars or flowers (whatever you’d like to call them!).

Once they were all glued, I pulled out my canvases and tried some configurations of the pieces, to determine how they’d lie when the project was complete. I couldn’t get this blog post out of my head, and ended up duplicating this girl’s design. I take no credit whatsoever for the placement of my flower-stars. So if you like the end result, you can go ahead and think about how cool Mandi is, not me.

Here are some of the trial-and-errors:

Once I was confident in my design, I pulled out the spray paint. If you’re a DIY expert, I’m sure you know all about spray paint. I am NOT. In fact, I don’t even like spray paint all that much. It’s messy. And now my hands are all messy, too, and I can’t seem to get the paint off them. Anywho…

I bought the cheapest white spray paint there was at WalMart. Ninety-seven cents. I mean, white paint is white paint, right?

Uhm, NO.

I sprayed every single little star/flower with a coat of white paint. And would you like to know what it did? NOTHING! It slid right off the TP tubes and onto the drop cloth. (And sadly, seeped through some cracks in the drop cloth that I didn’t know were there, and then I had to scrub it off the floor. See? I told you this stuff is messy!)

I must have been more in my right mind when I bought the red paint. Rust-oleum Painter’s Touch. Beautiful coverage. LOVED it.

Lesson learned. You actually get what you pay for when it comes to paint.

After the paint-on-the-floor debacle, my brain recalled reading this little tip. Use spray paint inside a cardboard box to contain the spray. Genius.

I sprayed all but two of the flower-stars red (which I hand-painted white, since the spray paint wasn’t working); then I let the paint dry for a while. I arranged the flower-stars on the canvases, and put a dab of hot glue in the center of each one to adhere it to the canvas.

Ready for the final product?

Here we go…..

TA DA!

Soon, I’ll hang it on a large, bare wall in our entryway. I think it’ll add a nice splash of color!