I wanted to make a cute little box centerpiece to house them (you may have seen various versions floating around on other blogs), but I wanted to use wood I had in my scrap pile already. Lucky for me I had a long 1x4 prefinished board left over from when I installed crown molding on my bathroom cabinets (this board was part of the backer board for the crown)
The bad part was that it as only finished on 3 sides, so I knew I couldn’t just use butt joints like most other tutorials or else the cut edges would show. So I had to get snazzy and miter the corners.
Here are what my cut pieces looked like. I just set the miter saw to 45 degrees for the cuts:
I used wood glue to secure the pieces before nailing.
Next I secured the pieces with bar clamps (seriously..if you don’t own at least 2 bar clamps you need to put them on your christmas list! These are my absolute favorites.)
I used my pneumatic nail gun to connect all the pieces, but once it was together you could see the rough cuts my saw made (I probably should replace my blade sometime.)
To deal with that I used some matching wood stain (this is the stuff I used when I stained my oak bathroom cabinets.)
You can see how that hid a multitude of flaws:
Next I added my bottles and a some sunflowers I picked up at Trader Joes:
Now I know you are thinking “That is more of a summer centerpiece, what about fall?” So, I also tried a few more ideas. Like this simple one featuring stalks of wheat:
I thought that was a tad too minimal so I added some burlap peonies I had in my floral stash:
I could picture it with tulips in the spring, or hydrangea in the summer. I can’t wait to use it over and over!