I am blessed with a serious surfeit of alphabet blocks. As in, once I culled an entire set for my kid, I still had an small shipping carton full.  Yeah, thrift stores have been good to us.  And I have a lot of thrifty friends who know I Like That Sort of Thing, so they pass them along.  Although I’ll never approach the heights of elaborate holiday preparation I’m seeing on some of the blogs I read, I still thought I’d get a little creative and have some fun.

Here are some of the letters in their natural state:

Since I want red for my end result, I spray-primed all the ones that weren’t red to start with:

Next, I gave everything a coat of red metalllic paint.  The ones I’d primed, I gave two coats:

Have you figured out where I’m going yet? No? 

Does that help?

I did a very slap-dash job on these, but that’s okay, because if you have looked at a lot of alphabet blocks (heh) you notice that they have varying quality paint jobs and that, over time, some of them get worn and dinged.  So even a lacksadaisical job looks pretty authentic, when you’re done.  I considered gluing the blocks together so that little hands can’t disarrange and lose them, but then I thought… seeing what else we can spell will be part of the fun in coming years and… you know I’ll need to add another initial next year. Have fun!

Just for fun, I’m trying something new that I’ve seen elsewhere.  You can add a link to your own Valentine’s Day blog posts by clicking the link below.  Try it out!  (Please link to a specific post, not your whole blog, or the list won’t make any sense!)