How to Make Dinosaur Bookends

How to Make Dinosaur Bookends

What do you give a girl who loves dinosaurs? Dinosaur bookends, of course!

My daughter turned 20 last week. I can hardly believe that this little peanut is so old. Seems like yesterday that she was giving slobbery kisses and following me around the house like a little shadow.

These days, you are more likely to see her like this…

Okay, maybe not all the time. Ha! Most of the time, I see her buried in textbooks, studying to be a paleontologist. Please hold off on the Ross Gellar references – she’s so much cooler than him!

It feels like just the other day when I posted about her 18th birthday, and here we are two years later! Time sure does fly.

Of course, present buying is always a bigger task when the birthday girl says she doesn’t know what she wants, but I’ve figured out that just scoping her Pinterest board for “products I love” will always lead me in the right direction. Almost feels like cheating!

One of the first pins I found was this one…

As always, please click on the picture to be taken to the website where you can find this item! Thank you Erin!!

Tori is a HUGE book lover, and her library is pretty impressive so far. I know when she has her own place someday, she will have books all over the place. Bookends will always be needed at her house.  Anyway, I thought this would be a great project for me to tackle. I decided to combine her love of books and dinosaurs.

I picked up a few of those plastic dinosaurs at Michaels and Target (4 of them were $1 a piece and the two bigger ones were $3 a piece).  We cut the two bigger ones in half.

I asked my husband to pick up a four foot piece of beautiful wood at Home Depot, which was $28. I know that’s a little pricey, but I knew I was going to be staining the pieces, so it had to be “good wood”.

This is what I did…

1. stained the wood with Minwax dark walnut stain
2. my husband cut the pieces down for me (then stained the sides of the wood)
3. we glued the wood pieces together and used our very cool Ryobi brad nailer (I love that thing!) to secure them
4. I put three coats of the Minwax Helmsman spar urethane spray
5. primed, then painted the dinosaurs black.
6. I used Gorilla Glue epoxy to attach the dinosaurs to the wood pieces
7. let everything dry for a day or two

She LOVED them!

Now, if I could just get my son to start a Pinterest account so I could get some ideas for his next birthday… 🙂

So, what pins from Pinterest have you tried lately??

Eliesa