Wooden rainbow...

My sister in law always decorates super cute for the holiday's. This year for St. Patrick's Day she wanted to find a rainbow to add to her decor, but wasn't able to find something that she loved by the time the holiday came and went. When I spotted this wooden rainbow on Pinterest I knew that we had to do it (yes, me included because I need to be better at decorating for holidays ;) ). One of my goals this year on my list is to get more into woodworking and learn to use different saws and this was the perfect project to get started with that.

Another thing about my sister in law, she is really good at following through with her projects. I went over to her house last week to just "talk" about the rainbow. Nicole does not just sit and talk about projects, she gets right on it! In the next few hours we had found a wood shop that carried wood 2 1/2 inches thick that we needed (can't buy wood like that at Home Depot...) and we had gone down there and bought our wood. The trip involved taking 4 kids with us down this industrial ally and me climbing a ladder and walking on some plywood floor in a warehouse to get our wood... yikes!!! I lived to tell the tale though and we now have some awesome rainbows!!

My father in law has lots of wood working tools so we got together Saturday to cut out the rainbows. We ended up making four, and it went super smooth. The tutorial says to mark the arches at 1/2 an inch, but when I traced it out it looked way too small. So we went with 3/4 and inch for each arch.

Me working the band saw...

Hubs on the sander...

They looked so pretty just raw wood too...

This week we got together and painted the arches. We used these water color paints from Michaels. They worked really well.

 Two coats of paint and then we set them to dry.

 We sealed them off with beeswax which really made the colors vibrant. And here is my final product...

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I really love it. I love that by using watercolors you can still see the wood grain through the paint. I love that my boy LOVES playing with it. My only complaint is that I'm not completely happy with the 2nd and 3rd from the bottom arches. I think I might switch those two colors around, but I'm not sure that I care enough to sand them down and re-paint them. 

 Now I have a cute rainbow for St. Patrick's Day and a fun toy for my boy to play with in the meantime. Very worthwhile project!!