I was checking my email recently and opened the daily Decor Steals email and saw this wooden American flag. I immediately loved it but did not love the price tag or the size. While it would be great as a statement piece on a big wall, it was a little too big for the space I wanted it to occupy above my mantel. What is a girl to do? DIY it, that’s what! 🙂 Now you can too! With the help of Mr. Wonderful, I made up this tutorial for this awesome DIY weathered wood American flag.

If you are not a DIYer, that is ok, you can always sign up for the Decor Steals emails and buy a flag from there when they offer it again in the future. However, theirs cost $79.99, ours cost us a whopping $5.37! Of course, we had some of the supplies on hand already but even with buying some of the other supplies, your cost to DIY it would be way under theirs.

Here is the flag above my mantel where I wanted it to go. If I bought the one from Decor Steals, it would have practically been the size of the whole mantel. I will be sharing my decorated mantel with the flag later in the week so check back for that! Also, I should mention that you are able to make this bigger if you want to, we just liked this size.

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use.  If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase.  I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself. Thank you for supporting my blog!

For this project you will need:

• Wood lath (13 pieces)
• Dark wood stain
• Aging stain
• Off white paint
• Gray paint (we used Revere Pewter latex paint)
• Foam brush
• Old paint brush
• Wood glue
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks

Tools Used:

• Miter saw
• Band saw
• Nail gun and brads
• Clamps
• Crowbar
• Kreg Jig Kit & screws
• Cricut & clear contact paper (optional)

After looking around at different options for wood planks to use, we found some wood lath at Menards. They are sold in bundles of 50 pieces but we were able to buy them singly for .39 a piece! The lath is 4 foot long so like I said previously, you could make this flag bigger if you wanted to, you would just have to use more lath pieces and tape off your stripes. We bought 15 pieces just in case we made a mistake on something. Our flag only requires 13 pieces as each piece will be a stripe in the flag.

Since each lath slat was 1.5 inches tall we knew our finished height would be around 19.5″ tall. We decided to make it 21″ tall so we could leave a little space in between each lath slat. Based on the height, we figured out a length that would look good and decided on 34″. Mr. Wonderful cut the lath to length using a miter saw.

We then figured out how big to make the stars portion of the flag by laying out a couple extra ends from the lath slats. It was  going to be 7 slats tall (because there are 7 stripes in the star portion on a real flag) so we decided to make the length 15 1/2″. It looked to be the appropriate size. We lightly marked this line with a pencil.

We laid out the lath slats in the positions we wanted them to be, paying attention to which side looked better. Then we numbered the back of the slats so we would know which order they needed to be in for the staining/painting later.

We tested a couple different stains to use. We went with an aging stain to make the unfinished slats look older. You can find the “recipe” for our aging stain in our DIY tobacco basket tutorial. It is super easy to make and we like to keep some around in a jar to use for various projects. After a while it becomes really rusty colored, so occasionally we have to make up a new batch. Here is what the wood with the aging stain looks like compared to the bare wood.

For the darker stripes, we used an espresso colored stain. This is a really dark brown stain that almost comes off as black so it is not one that we use by itself very often. However, it is a great stain to use as a base under some chippy white paint for a farmhouse look. Trust me, it is worth picking up a quart to have around!

I got busy staining while Mr. Wonderful put together the frame for the flag. As you can see in the above picture, we originally put blue tape on all the slats to mark off where the star portion was going to be but I soon realized that was an unnecessary step. Only some of the slats needed to be taped off.

Since I loved the Decor Steals flag, I decided to just copy exactly the colors they had on each stripe. We wrote out a chart to show where we needed the aging stain (A) vs the espresso stain (E).

1. A -> E
2. E – > A
3. A
4. A
5. E -> A
6. A
7. A
8. E
9. A
10. A
11. E
12. A
13. E

On the slats with half and half stain, I first stained the whole slat with the aging stain and let that dry. Then I taped off stripes 1, 2 & 5. Make sure to put the tape on the correct side of the line. 🙂 I used a foam brush to stain with. It worked well except it did bleed under the blue tape. What I should have done (and what you should do) is stain up to about 1″ from the tape and use your “wipe off cloth” to wipe the stain up to the tape. That should make for a cleaner line. Fortunately, I was going to paint over the worst ones anyway so that it covered the bleeding. I let the stain dry overnight.

For the painted portions, I needed 3 colors… white and two shades of gray. To achieve the look of a darker and lighter gray, I just used one gray color and applied it on top of the lighter and darker stains. The gray color is the same paint we used on our walls, Revere Pewter by Benjamin Moore. These colors could also be done by using different shades of stains (which may look more like the Decor Steals flag) but I wanted the flag’s colors to look good against our wall so I just used the same paint. 😁 I knew it would look a little different since it was being painted over stained wood but that it would still coordinate. We made up another chart for where I needed to paint the gray (G) vs white (W) paint.

1. G -> None
2. None -> W
3. None -> G
4. None -> W
5. G -> None
6. None -> White
7. G
8. None
9. None
10. G
11. G
12. W
13. None

I taped off the slats that would be painted half one color.  Again, make sure to apply the tape on the correct side.

The off white color was painted on first. To achieve a weathered look, I used a dry brush technique. Using an old paintbrush, I dabbed a little paint onto the end and lightly brushed the paint on. Your paint brush will accumulate more paint as you go which is fine, just make sure to blot off onto a paper plate or something first before brushing on the slat. Make sure to paint the sides and ends of all the slats too!

The goal is to not completely cover the slat in paint. You want a little of the wood to show through. That is what gives it the weathered look. The roughness of the lath made this a little easier to do. Since the white paint was acrylic, it dried very quickly.

I used the same dry brush technique to apply the gray paint.

To build the frame, Mr. Wonderful used some scrap pieces of wood that were roughly 1″x 2″ in size. Since the top and bottom of the flag frame was not going to be as visible as the sides, he decided to make the joints visible along the long ends.

He cut the short ends first to 21″.

He knew we wanted the length to be 34″. Mr. W says an easy way to figure out how long to cut the top and bottom pieces is to lay both of the short end pieces together placed at the 34″ mark of one of the longer pieces.  The measurement on the other side of the two pieces is what you will cut the long ends at.  In this case, he cut them to 30 3/16″ length. Alternatively, you could just measure both pieces and subtract from 34″ but the other way you don’t have to do math. 😉

To assemble the frame, he used a Kreg jig and screws. Mr. Wonderful uses the Kreg jig all the time and highly suggests that you get one. It makes putting things together a breeze!

He did apply some wood glue on the ends before screwing them together. Use some clamps to help hold the pieces together while assembling the frame. Once the outside edges of the frame were put together, Mr. W added two more support pieces in the middle to nail the lath slats to. You could omit those but we wanted to make sure the lath would remain straight.

After the flag was finished, he added an extra piece of wood in the center (previewed below) so we would have something to hang it from. Alternatively, you could use any kind of picture hanging hardware to achieve this. We used the aging stain on the frame to match some of the slats and let that dry.

Starting with the first, last and center stripe, we nailed the slats down to the frame using a finishing nailer and 3/4″ brads. With these three in place, it was easier to space out the remaining slats.

Some of the lath slats had a slight curve or bow to them so a crowbar came in handy to help get them in the positions we wanted before nailing them down.

We just eyeballed the spacing in between each slat. Use the numbers on the back to make sure you are adding the stripes in the right order.

The next step was to apply the stars. We used our Cricut to make a stencil to paint the stars on. If you do not have a Cricut, you could always use a star stamp or even make your own from a piece of foam. This was just an easier way for us to get the spacing correct. If you have a Cricut, here is the .jpg file of our star field you can use.

We like to mark the corners and edges of where we will be applying the stencil. This makes it easier to apply the stencil so you are not sticking it down and pulling it back up to readjust several times.

After the stencil was applied, I used a stipple brush to paint the stars on. Make sure to rub down around each star before painting to make sure the paint doesn’t get under the stencil. Use up and down patting motions to apply the paint instead of brushing it on. This will also help to prevent bleeding under the stencil.

When you get all the stars painted, you can pull off the stencil and throw it away. We use clear contact paper to make our stencils, which is pretty inexpensive, so making a one time use stencil is not a big deal.

The Decor Steals flag had some stars that stuck out to look 3D and I wanted to recreate that look as well. We printed and cut out a star that was a little bigger than the ones we painted on. I traced those on a couple of the lath remnants and Mr. W cut them out using a band saw.

I painted the stars with the same white acrylic paint and we hot glued them over some of the stars on the star field. Again, I just placed them in the same places as the Decor Steals flag.

I LOVE how it turned out. This is a piece of decor that can be used not only for the 4th of July but all year round! Especially because of the neutral colors in it! I decorated my mantel around this flag and will most likely just leave it up the rest of the summer!

I love the weathered look of the wood too. Isn’t amazing that all these colors were from 2 stain and 2 paint colors?

I also love the 3D dimension the stars gave to the flag.

I know this project is a little more involved but the end product is definitely worth it! And you can’t beat the price! 😉 I will be back soon to show you my neutral summer patriotic mantel. Until then, have a wonderful week!