Decorative Baby Hangers

These two different sets of baby hangers were a pretty quick and easy DIY project that I whipped up for a long-time friend and mom-to-be for a baby shower gift. I love the idea of giving hand-crafted and/or personalized gifts, so I Googled around for some insperado and came across a blog called Ashley Ann photography that shared this tutorial on DIYing decoupage children’s hangers that was taken from Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts.

I started out with these seventeen thrifted hangers (you can read more about that here).

A pretty sweet find for just 29 cents a pop! After considering my design options, I decided that 10 hangers would make for a nice well-rounded amount to be given as a gift. The theme for the baby’s nursery is owls/woodland creatures, so I definitely wanted to incorporate that into the design. But at the same time, my eagerness to experiment with the idea of painting, distressing and glazing (I have recently become fascinated with the world of “renewing” old and forgotten pieces of vintage/antique furniture, mainly from stumbling across this fabulous blog, which lead me to this blog… but I will hit more on that in a later post) urged me to want to go with a more shabby-chic or anthropologie-style design… So why not do both!?

And so I did…

First I sanded and wiped down all ten hangers, and then protected the metal hanger-part with some painter’s tape:

Next, I went-a-spray-painting away! (I decided to skip out on priming mainly because I was short on time, but when I hit a big project, like a piece of furniture, I will MOST DEFINITELY prime before painting.) Five hangers got 2 coats of pink paint and the other five got 2 coats of ivory paint, allowing them to fully dry between coats of course to avoid any unsightly dripping. And as far as the drying process went, I just made some space in the enrty coat closet (actually I have to give Rob credit for coming up with that simple solution) for them to hang until dry:

After they dried, I distressed and coated the ivory hangers with sandpaper and clear polyurethane protective-coating:

While those were drying, I started getting to work on the pink hangers by cutting out the bird designs from a set of woodland-creature themed scrap-book card-stock that I already had on hand, and using a folder that had a cute picture of a bird as a guide:

As for the owl cut-outs, one of them (the green one) was from an image already on the card-stock, and the other one (the blue one) was from some gift-wrap that I had on hand for use on the armoire that I renewed for my niece’s nursery. And the little cutout that I painted the letter “A” on (the baby’s name will be Avery) was also from the cardstock:

Using Mod-Podge, I glued down all the cutouts in place and then applied a coat of polyurethane protective-coating onto the pink hangers. While those were hanging to dry, I got busy on monogramming the ivory hangers (which I really am not entirely pleased with the result of free-hand painting the letters on, I really would have rather used decals, but didn’t find any at Michael’s – but eh, sometimes you just gotta work with what you got). And then I busted out my ever-so-prized vintage rhinestone button collection and glued some of those babies onto the hangers as so: