Wedowee's Christmas Card Lane: DIY Giant Wooden Christmas Card

lake wedowee life & the town of wedowee are sponsoring Christmas card lane here in the middle of town.

since i did not want to do one for my photography business and we are already doing one for the magazine, i decided to see about doing one for the elementary school. there are several children who cannot participate in Christmas celebrations at the school so i felt like that would not be appropriate for the school to have one. however, in mr. B's class all the students can participate and he has a wonderful teacher who agreed to let me construct a massive Christmas card for the middle of our town!

here are some photographs of the preparation process (some of these are cell phone pics so bare with me) i am sharing in case there is someone else who needs inspiration

i started out with a 4 x 8 piece of plywood (the base) and different size pieces of wood ("rulers").

next i laid the pieces out on the base and decided where they needed to be cut.

then i used my jigsaw and jigged away!

i laid the pieces back out on the base to make sure i had the right sizes.

then i started spray painting my "rulers".

these were done in the dark...daylight savings always ruins the fall and winter evenings.

after spraying all my "rulers" i took a giant marker and marked them up.

after the "rulers" dried i assembled them to the base.

i also made the tree trunk. i forgot to mention that before but here is the first shot of it.

i had the children in B's class make ornaments. my plan was to let the children take these home, but a huge storm came through town and sadly over half of the Christmas cards fell over....and these were made of glass (its what i already had at home.....i know it was a bad idea but for future reference do not use glass ornaments) we put acrylic paint inside and let the children swirl them around. then they decorated them with a sharpie.

  

here is my finished product. i had my boss do the lettering because i am horrible at it.

the children enjoyed seeing theor ornaments hanging from their card as the bus drove by everyday!

here are some of the other cards that were in town as well.

{Magazine I work for in case you didn't know}