Dont you love the look of that fancy crown molding you see in nice homes? Not just wooden, painted molding but gold-embellished molding that looks elegant and expensive? Actually, it is elegant and expensive! Nice molding is not cheap and is not easy to hang. You have to get out saw horses, assorted saws, measuring devices, hammer and nails and other tools. Forget all that! Save lots of money and make things easy on yourself by making crown molding in a completely different way. Believe it or not, you can make gorgeous and impressive molding by starting with slabs of Styrofoam.
Order Styrofoam online or visit your local craft store to find it. The type of Styrofoam you need is the white kind - not the green. The green is used for floral arrangements. Purchase Styrofoam by the slab and in the thickness you want for your "molding". Youll find very sizes of Styrofoam, in various thicknesses, to make it easy for you to find just the right thickness for the project you want to do. Its easy for you to cut the Styrofoam slab down to the different sections youll need to create the molding.
Its much easier to cut Styrofoam if you use a serrated knife. Cut an old piece of candle a couple of times, to transfer the wax to the knife, and youll have an even easier time cutting and scoring the Styrofoam. Use an ordinary yardstick to measure how wide you want the molding to be. Cut the slab into "planks" that will be individual sections of the new molding. Now youll create the designs you want on the Styrofoam molding. Its helpful to lay the molding, end-to-end, in a long row. That way, as you create the design, you can make it align exactly with the next "plank". If you dont have the room for all of that just do one plank, lay it beside the next one, and used the first one as a pattern to repeat the design on the other planks. Designs can be very simplistic or more elaborate. Keep in mind that, whatever designs you create on the first plank, youll have to also recreate them on each and every plank that follows. A design on the molding can be a simple line scored into the Styrofoam. Use a yard stick to draw a line across the top of the Styrofoam plank, a few inches from the top, then create a matching line a few inches from the bottom. Simply hold the yardstick in the area you want to score and run the knife across that line a couple of times. Barely score the line to create one look; cut a deep gouge to create a different appearance. Make several lines that are equally separated or three horizontal sections - one large and two much more narrow. There are no limits to the designs you can create on the molding. Styrofoam can be easily painted if you choose the right paint. Some paints can actually melt Styrofoam so check the label before selecting the paint. The white color of the Styrofoam gives you another option: use it as-is. Use the white background as the "painted" part of the wood, then create the golden designs you want on each plank. You can choose from various techniques, colors and designs to create just the right molding for your home. After preparing the Styrofoam as you want it (with or without paint) you can then begin creating the golden designs. You can use stencils and gold paint that you apply with a brush or you can use tube paints that dispense from a small squeeze bottle. Or, use ordinary paint markers instead. The stencil paints or paint markers will create a flat look to the golden accents; the tube paints will give the paints more of a dimensional appearance. Make stripes, lines, dots, squiggles, zig-zags or other patterns on the Styrofoam to create the look you want. You can combine other things to make the molding you want. For example, you can glue a strip of wallpaper, horizontally, down the middle of the Styrofoam. Above and below that, you can use the golden paints to create additional designs and patterns. When youre finished simply use double-sided tape, peel-and-stick picture hangers, or even glue strips to attach the Styrofoam - no hammer and nails needed. Youll lo
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