Stick & Twig Letters

I’ve seen this craft quite a bit, most recently an old post from hellolittlehouse.com surfaced somewhere in my line of sight (maybe Pinterest?), and I realized I really wanted to try it.

The weather last week has been unusually warm, so I wanted to stay outside for a bit. A nature craft fit my needs perfectly.

Our house is in a older neighborhood, and while that does have it’s downsides (older house = lots of things to fix, most of them expensive), it also means we have huge towering oak and gum trees in the yard. Not those spindly trees you see in the new subdivisions. Oh, their doors probably open and close correctly, and they probably don’t have any cracks in their walls or ceilings, but they simply do not have game when it comes to sticks and leaves for crafts.

The basics of this craft are cut out a letter shape, fill with cut-down-to-size sticks.

Any normal person would print out an easy to fill in typeface on a letter size sheet.

And that certainly isn’t me 🙂

I have an affinity for this particular font,  so I went with it. I taped the printed out sheet to a cereal box and cut it out. You probably could cut this with your Silhouette or Cricut, but I don’t have a deep cut blade and it wasn’t very intricate. And the cardboard part won’t be showing in the final piece, so I just went at it with the kitchen scissors.

Next stop was wandering around the yard finding appropriate sticks. Mr. SuzerSpace was mildly amused as I went about with a little shopping bag picking and choosing. He had spent the previous weekend filling 30 gallon paper bags with sticks, which is a bit of a different project.

There are no rules here, but I found straighter sticks  easier to cut and slide up next to each other than the really crooked ones. Thinner sticks give you more options for bends (and odd serif tails), but thicker sticks take up more room to make the crafting faster.

I set up outside with another cereal box as my workspace protector. Using white tacky glue, I selected and trimmed them as needed with pruning shears. I started at the top and test fit a few pieces at a time before actually gluing down the sticks. Once that set was sticky enough to move on, I’d repeat the process.

To finish this, I’m going to glue it to a heavy sheet of colored stock, and frame. I’m planning a gallery wall of my initial letter, so I’m going to wait until I have a few more letters finished to set up my color and frame scheme.