DIY Decorative Door Hanger by Elizabeth Roberts

Making a decorative door hanger is a great way to add some character and fun to your front door. This project is a great way to ease yourself into DIY home décor and get your creativity flowing! This is a great project for first time DIYers.

 The materials you will need for this project are:

·        Blank Wood Round  

·        Paint

·        Wood Stain

·        Paint Brush

·        Fine Grit Sandpaper

·        Painter’s Tape

·        Vinyl

·        Hot Glue Gun

·        Wired Ribbon

·        Floral Wire

·        Cricut Machine (you can choose to purchase pre-cut vinyl stickers for your door hanger if you’re not ready to invest in a Cricut machine yet.) *Photo complimentary of Circut.com*

You will need to lightly sand your blank wood round with fine grit sandpaper. This will help remove any minor imperfections in the wood and give you a smooth finish to stain or paint. Remove the excess dust from sanding and you’re ready for step 2.

Stain the entire wood round, front and back.  Once you have stained the wood round you will need to it dry completely, please refer to the manufacturer's recommended drying time for the wood stain you chose. After your stained wood round has dried completely you will place a piece of painter’s tape directly across the middle of the wood round to divide it into two sections. You paint one half of the wood round black. Again, you will need to let the paint dry completely per the manufacturer’s directions, so lets move on to Step 3.

As mentioned, you can choose to buy a pre-cut vinyl sticker for the door hanger if you’re not ready to invest in a Cricut machine at this time. If you chose to do this skip to Step 7.  You will need to login to Cricut Design Space to format your Cricut machine to cut your vinyl sticker sheet. You can do this on your phone or computer. Click here to access the program hyperlink Cricut Design Space . Once in Cricut design space you will insert a text box.  Type Welcome in the text box.  For the font you will want to select Amertha, or you can choose one to your liking.  You will format the size of the vinyl sticker based on how large your wood round is.  I have formatted my sticker to be 11.5 inches wide for my 15-inch-wide wood round. 

Select the Make It button in your Cricut Design Space program. Follow the step-by-step prompts from the program. The program will show you a preview of how large the design will be on your mat. Cut your vinyl to the desired size and stick it to the mat. Insert the mat into your Cricut machine and let the Cricut machine start cutting your sticker.

Remove your mat from the Cricut machine and weed your vinyl. Weeding is the process of removing the excess vinyl from your sticker. 

You will now put transfer tape over the top of your vinyl sticker. This will make it possible to transfer your vinyl sticker to the wood round in one piece and with the ability to adjust it as needed. If you chose to use a pre-cut sticker, the transfer tape will already be applied to the sticker. Now that you have your transfer tape on the sticker you can place the vinyl sticker in the desired place on your wood round. Be sure that you have let your paint completely dry before transferring the vinyl sticker to the wood round. Once you have the vinyl sticker where you want it, remove the transfer tape leaving the vinyl sticker adhered to the wood round

Take the wired ribbon you have and cut it into a 16 inch long piece. You will make the bow by arranging the ribbon into a figure 8 and gathering in the middle. Once you have your ribbon gathered in the middle secure it with floral wire. You will cut an 8 inch long piece of ribbon to be the tails of the bow. I like to taper the ends of the bow tails to give the bow a more elegant look. Secure the tails to the bow with floral wire. You need to one more piece of ribbon, this piece will be 2 inches long. You will take your 2 inch piece of ribbon and wrap it around the middle of the bow covering up the floral wire, secure it in place with hot glue. 

Cut an inch piece of wired ribbon to attach to the back of the wood round. This will allow you to hand to wood round on your front door. Flip your wood round over so the backside is facing up. You attached the wired ribbon to the door hanger using hot glue. Fold your wired ribbon in half and attach to both ends to the wood round using hot glue. Be sure that your wood round will hang level before choosing where to attach the ribbon. Once you have attached the ribbon to the back of the wood round and the glue is dry, flip the wood round over. Now you can attach your bow to the front of the wood round using hot glue.  

Now that you all the hot glue is dry, the last step is to hang up your door hanger and show off all your hard work!