Personalized Wedding Dress Hanger

Hello! Are you all excited for the weekend? I am, but I'm also nervous. The half marathon is this weekend and Joe and I are both kind of nursing running injuries. My foot has been hurting since a run on Monday and Joe's knee is hurting him. Hopefully we can push through and make it 13.1 miles on Saturday though. I'm not sure if the rest of the weekend will be productive, but we'll see. This past weekend, I headed to Wichita on Saturday for a bridal shower and bachelorette party for my good friend, Chase. I've know Chase since our freshman year at Rolla. We lived on the same dorm floor then eventually shared a house with 3 of our other good friends. It was really fun to meet her new Wichita friends and relive some of our college days :) See you next week for the wedding, Chase! I drove home from Wichita on Sunday and spent most of the day recovering from our Saturday night out. Then sand volleyball started on Sunday night! I'm excited to be playing again.

This little project I have to show you is a present I made for Chase. I've seen these special coat hangers before in lots of wedding photo shoots but I'd never really thought of making one myself. You can buy one on Etsy and I think they run around $30. A couple weeks ago, my friend Shayna made one for a bachelorette party she went to and it got the wheels turning in my head. She gave some instructions on her blog and you can see them here. Based on her instructions, I went and bought a 100' spool of 14 gauge wire, and some wooden coat hangers. I didn't trust myself to just sketch out the name that I wanted to write with wire, so I searched for a couple more DIY instructions and one of them mentioned a free font you could download that had nice loopy letters that could be made with wire. That tutorial can be found here.

I started by taking the crossbar off of the coat hanger since the name would be going there. Then I downloaded the free font and printed out "Mrs. Hobbs". Next I used some needle nose pliers to start bending the wire. It took me a couple tries to get started. Bending the wire was harder than I expected. It took some practice to get it bent at the right spot. I also didn't clip the wire until I was done with the name. I think next time I'll use some round objects like pens to get nice smooth curves.

Once the name was done, I had Joe drill a couple holes partially through the coat hanger. Then I spray painted it navy blue and glued the wire name in place with small dabs of super glue. The final step was to add a little yellow bow. I think it turned out cute!

Some other variations I've seen are the bride and groom's first names with a heart in between (like my friend Shayna did), or maybe the wedding date or just "I do" instead of names. This would also be really cute if you got the small children's coat hangers and added the name to hang a special dress on. I have 2 coat hangers left from my pack of three and I just so happen to have 2 sisters getting married this year. So Mary and Sara, if you'd like a personalized wedding coat hanger, just let me know and I'd love to make you one :)

I guess that's it for tonight. I wish I had better "how-to" pictures for you guys, but I don't think they would have shown very much. Wish us luck on the half marathon this weekend! Oh, and happy birthday to Aunt Sharon (today) and to Dad (tomorrow)!

p.s. I try to keep things pretty light-hearted on the blog, but I just wanted to say that my thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the Boston marathon bombings, and also those affected by the explosion in Texas. It's sad to see the pain and panic, but inspiring that there are always people willing to rush in to the chaos to help a stranger. I'm thankful for those everyday heroes.