Tutorials – Wood Pieces and Beaded Pins

Hello! Today I’m going to show you how I made the wood-effect pieces and beaded pins that are part of my January Counterfeit Kit!

First up –

Wood Veneer Style Pieces!

To make these you’ll need:

• Some chipboard shapes
• Acrylic paint in white, yellow and brown
• A paintbrush
• A piece of fine sandpaper
• A baby-wipe

Step 1: Choose which chipboard pieces you want to use:

Step 2: Paint the front of them with 2 coats of white acrylic paint. Try not to paint the edges too much, as wood veneer pieces usually have dark edges, so it looks better if they stay as bare chipboard as much as possible:

Step 3: Mix a teeny-tiny bit of yellow and brown paint in with a big blob of white acrylic. I then painted one coat which was pale-yellow looking (I forgot to photograph that stage) and then mixed in a bit more brown for the next coat of paint so it looked warmer:

Step 4: Once this is dry, use fine sandpaper to rub gently all over the pieces, so you’re revealing the pale yellow coat, beneath. It doesn’t matter if you reveal a bit of the white paint too – but try not to sand it right back to the bare chipboard:

Step 5: Rub your fingertips over the pieces to remove any sandpaper residue. Then mix some medium brown acrylic paint, and use a dry paint brush to pick up a little of the paint, and add lines to one of the pieces:

Step 6: Quickly, before the paint dries, wipe off some of the paint with a baby-wipe, moving the wipe in the same direction as your painted lines, to blur the edges and take off some of the paint:

That’s it! Just repeat the last two steps on one piece at a time until you’ve got all your pieces looking nice and wood-like:

Now here’s how to do the –

Beaded Pins

Step 1: Start with some pearl headed pins (from a haberdashery) and a selection of beads. If you don’t have any pearl headed pins you could glue a bead to the top of a pin first and leave it to dry completely before the next steps:

Step 2: Decide on the beads you want to use, and the order you want them to go in:

Step 3: Carefully dip the hole end of each pin, one at a time, into some wet glue that dries clear, and then push the bead onto your pin, glue end upwards. So you’re sticking the first bead to your pearl head, then each one afterwards is sticking to the bead above it:

That’s it! Just wipe off any excess glue as you go and then leave all your pins to dry thoroughly:

If you stick your pins to your projects by using a 3D foam dot, to push the pin point into, it will make extra sure the beads don’t fall off! I have also since made some more beaded pins by just glueing the last bead – putting the glue onto the bottom of the last bead after it had been pushed onto the pin. But I don’t know if I trust those ones to stay together as much – I might try it with some superglue next time.

There we go! Let me know if you have any questions. Keep an eye on the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog for links to other tutorials!

If you use these tutorials in any way to inspire your projects I’d love to hear about it! And don’t forget I’m happy for you to pin this post to your Pinterest boards if you have them, so you can check it again another day.

I shall be sharing my first projects made using my January Kit within the next couple of days! x