"Count Your Blessings" Thanksgiving Decor

I love making frugal decor. One of my passions is painting scraps of wood - because it is extremely frugal and easy. Of course it is only extremely frugal if you get the wood for free, but I have had to buy wood for a specific project in the past and it was still pretty cheap. Here is what I recently made for Thanksgiving....

There are a couple of houses under construction on my street. I saw a big scrap pile at one of them and asked if they were throwing it out, and if they were, if I take some. I came home with a lot of pieces. I didn't feel like cutting the wood so I worked around what sizes I had. These are 2x6's. I sanded each block on all sides. It is super fast with my husbands power sander. I painted one a golden yellow, one a pear green, and the other I mixed some orange and red together. Then I made stencils with my cuttlebug using three different fonts. I then taped the stencils to the blocks with masking tape and sponge painted the letters with antique white. All paints were acrylic. So easy. I was going to sand each board again lightly and then stain it, but I didn't, and they still look good. When I didn't have the cuttlebug, I would print letters off my computer and cut them out. I would tape the edges back together that I had to cut through, like the letter "o". It is more time consuming but it still works.
Here is a project I did last year when I didn't have a cuttlebug, and I made the stencil by printing out the letters and cutting them by hand. This was also the board I had to buy. I think the whole 1x6 was less than $10. I got Home Depot to cut it twice (which they do for free) to the size I needed. This board cost less than $5, and I have two other pieces to make something with. I love what one can do with a little bit of wood, a little bit of time, and a little bit of paint.