It’s Thanksgiving this week for my American readers, but as she celebrates Sarah in Illinois is already looking ahead to Christmas. Timely, as we’re exactly one month away from Christmas. Yipes! Sarah is back today to share a cute DIY for displaying Christmas cards.

One of my favorite parts of Christmas is checking the mail box for Christmas cards. I love sending and receiving cards and putting them on display. However, I have never really had a way to display them that looked nice.

This year I decided to turn to Pinterest to come up with a plan. There were so many cute ideas, but I did not use one specific image as my inspiration. I searched for “Christmas card holder” and used an idea from here and a feature from there, and this is what I came up with:

I started by making a frame out of simple 1×2. I decided I wanted the inside of my frame to be about 16×20 inches, but that measurement could easily be adjusted to any size.

I cut my 1×2 at a 45 degree angle making sure that the right and left side were exactly the same length and did the same for the top and bottom. That way the frame would be square.

The trickiest part of the whole project was nailing the frame together. Because I am stubborn, I didn’t ask for help. But having someone to help hold the pieces would be easier. Using screws would also have been easier, but I didn’t want the screw heads to show.

At this point, I grabbed some stain that we had sitting around and gave it a good coat and wiped off the excess. Many of the inspiration pictures that I was looking at used chicken wire as the background, but I felt the chicken wire was too “country” for my taste so I planned to use hardware cloth.

I found these little bitty clothes pins to use to hang the cards on the wire.

They came as bare wood, so I used the same stain as I did for the frame to give them a little interest. I used tin snips to cut the hardware cloth to size and then stapled it to the back of the frame.

For the pennants, I had to do some experimenting. I used quarter-inch plywood and cut it in a strip 2.5 inches wide. Then I had to cut it into the pennant shape. But I didn’t know what angle that should be. So I just tried until I liked the way it looked.

I set my miter at 45 degrees, and I didn’t like that angle, so I changed it to 30 degrees. That was better, but I still felt it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. The next pre-marked measurement on my saw was 22.5 degrees, so I tried that and thought it looked just right!

After I cut several pennants, I used a little drill bit to put holes in the top to string some jute through.

But before I strung them up I painted with a little craft acrylic paint. All that was left was to hang them at the top of the frame. I did that by tying the string to the back of the frame on the hardware cloth.

My frame is now hung on the wall and ready for the first card to come in the mail!

What a cute display, Sarah. It’s just country enough, in my opinion. To see what else is inspiring Sarah, follow her on Pinterest.

I hope that Sarah and all my other American readers have a great Thanksgiving.