Patina Gold Letters

Last week on my road trip to JoAnn's I got these paper mache letters:

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I don't know why but these are impossible to find in Canada!

Like most of you I love the zinc Anthropologie letters (minus the price tag).

Anthropologie

But since these are for my friend's wedding (her colour scheme is a dark seafoam green and gold), I went ahead and tried a patina gold look.

I wasn't really sure what I was doing but figured gold and black paint should do the trick!

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Why magnetic paint? Simply because it's the only black paint I had on hand. No other reason. =)

The magnetic paint dries pretty fast especially on the paper mache so I had to work fast and painted little sections at a time.

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Not bad!

Here's what you do:

Start off with black paint- dabbing it on the letter- you just need a little bit and you don't want to cover the whole letter with black otherwise it'll be WAY too dark. Just create spots of black.Then while it's still wet (very important!), add the gold paint and mix! I used criss-cross brush strokes to get a patina look. Add more gold as needed. 

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I'm thinking these will be great on the guest book table. I was hoping JoAnn's would have an ampersand but no such luck. I just might have to splurge and get the Anthropologie ampersand and paint it to match. 

They actually turned out a lot better than I thought. I went into it not sure what would happen! 

One day I'll try to paint faux zinc letters but these will do for now! =)

That one little bottle of gold paint sure goes a long way! Remember these thrift store frames?

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They all got a coat of gold + black paint!

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Some of these frames will be hanging behind the head table, some will be displayed on the guest book table. Slowly but surely the wedding decorations are coming together!