Grab Clothespins To Make Colorful Butterfly Decor For Indoors Or Outdoors

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As harbingers of spring and symbols of rebirth, butterflies are a whimsical choice for decor that also carries deeper meaning. One way to embrace these icons of joy and transformation is to take basic home products and turn them into colorful and magical butterfly artworks. For example, building a large butterfly to decorate your walls is an amazing way to use clothespins in your home or garden, as demonstrated by YouTube creator SULTANIN OYUNCAK ATÖLYESİ in a tutorial. She uses a clever method to reshape clothespins into gorgeous butterflies, which are perfect for hanging in groups on a wall in your home or along your patio fence. With a little extra creativity and time, you could even unleash a whole flood of butterflies indoors or out.

If you have broken wooden clothespins that no longer work, you can use them for this DIY project. However, you can also buy a pack of Mr. Pen Large Wooden Clothespins for about $6. You'll also need a hot glue gun or another type of strong adhesive to bond the clothespins together, as well as an outdoor sealant, like Mod Podge Waterbased Sealer, if you intend to hang your fluttering creations outdoors. After all, these wooden butterflies make for stunning outdoor wall decor ideas that aren't plants, so don't be afraid to use them to spruce up your green space. Also, raid your craft room for a veritable kaleidoscope of bright acrylic paints to decorate your butterflies — the bolder the colors, the better, for capturing the freedom and beauty of these popular pollinators!

First, you need to remove all of the metal clips from the center of the wooden clothespins. To build your first butterfly, glue the two pieces of one clothespin together along their flat sides. Once you've glued two sets of clothespin halves, stack them one atop the other to form the center of one wing. Glue more clothespin halves to this central column, fanning them outward until the wing is completed. Repeat the process until you've created four symmetrical wings. Another set of clothespin halves, glued together along their flat sides, serves as the body to which you connect the four wings. If you have trouble stacking and gluing the pieces as you go, begin by arranging all the clothespin halves into a butterfly shape and then attach everything with adhesive.

The creator behind the YouTube channel SULTANIN OYUNCAK ATÖLYESİ decorates her butterfly simply with black, bright purple, and white paint. She uses a black permanent marker to add realistic details to the wings. While you could choose this sleek yet simple look for your own butterflies, you could also consider modeling your creations on real-life species. Why not recreate the iconic orange wings with white and black markings of a monarch butterfly? Or paint on the patterns of a western tiger swallowtail — a pretty yellow butterfly species with tiger-like stripes. Go a step further and rearrange the clothespin halves to better capture the shape of your chosen species' wings. You can also grab clothespins to make rustic dragonfly decor to hang beside your new kaleidoscope of butterflies.