This is a fairly simple project that came about from a need.  Necessity, so they say, is the mother of invention.

I have several aprons with no homes, and no one really gets much joy out of a wad of aprons crumpled in a drawer.

One of the benefits of the homestead we bought has been the abundance of raw materials to reclaim.  My husband has been tearing down an old shed piecemeal, and sawing the boards to fit the smokehouse he is building.  I’m fairly certain he is even straightening the old nails with a hammer and reusing them.  I’ll have to get him to write about that in a future post.

Today is not that day, though.  Today was the day I got my aprons out of a pile and onto the wall.

For this project, I used a length of board that I found lying around; it’s maybe three feet long?  I didn’t measure it.  I screwed ten brass-plated cup hooks into the board by hand, eyeballing the center and using the width of my hand as a spacer.  I used some on-hand thumbtacks and paperclips to make wall hangers for the back.

I didn’t sand the wood or stain it; it has been weathered by the actual weather.  I didn’t even wash it.  I just employed a child to scrape the mud off the sides.  I think she took turns with another child.

Regardless, as you can see, it doesn’t take much money to make something useful and beautiful.  A stained hook board this size goes for at least twenty dollars at a discount store, but mine was made completely from basic hardware that I keep on hand for repairs and a piece of scrap wood that was lying around.

I think it turned out well.