Shutters for Displaying Christmas Cards

Thank you to everyone who left me such wonderful comments on my rustic Christmas décor! I may not have been able to reply to all of you, but I DID read each and every comment! And thank you to the rest of you who took time out of your day to look at my post. 

As promised, I am sharing with you the tutorial for creating the shutter screens that I display my Christmas cards on.

I am completely obsessed with decorating my home using shutters (only I use them on the inside instead of the outside!) I have one hanging in our half bathroom and two more in our upstairs hallway dressing up a dormer window. Luckily I still had two pairs laying around.

I began by attaching three hinges to hold a pair of shutters together.

I mixed two colors of red acrylic paint together (cadmium red medium & Lucas madder red) to get the perfect Christmasy red.

A perfect Christmas red is neither too orange nor too cranberry. It is very similar to Coca-Cola red.  

Factoid: Did you know that Coca-cola red is so special that the company does not share the formula for the color?

Using a 2" Purdy paint brush, I dabbed the brush into the paint and then wiped it off on the plate. Then dry brushed the paint onto the shutters, letting the bristles skip over the slats.

I kept dry brushing the shutter until I had enough paint for it to appear red, and yet some of the dark green color still peeked through.

 

Here is a close up of the green paint showing through:

Then I set each screen up in the corners of our living room and used clothespins to attach the cards.

The red shutters really bring in the holiday spirit!

I'm curious, how do you display your cards each year?