Day 83: Personalized Roasting Sticks

Making personalized roasting sticks turned out to be a pretty big ordeal. Did you know that it is impossible to find wire hangers without a plastic coating on it?! I looked and looked and looked for them with no success. We decided to try using 16 gage wire. This wasn't stiff enough. We doubled it up and even tripled and quadrupled it and it still was to flimsy.
We went to Lowe's to search for a metal stick that might work for your roasting sticks. We found some that looked perfect but they were zinc covered and left back stuff all over our hands so we were afraid of poisoning people. We found some more that also looked like they would work but they were almost $3 a piece and I had to make 20 of these, so that was a big no!
We finally went to Wal-Mart and bought plastic covered wire hangers. We brought them home and Pete went to work on striping them of all the plastic with a knife. After all the plastic was removed he straightened them with pliers and cut them to size with wire cutters.

I took 3 thick dowel rods and using my trusty hack saw, cut them all to the length that I wanted my handles to be.

After they were all cut, I sanded the ends and painted each handle a different color using acrylic paint.

 

Pete drilled a hole in 1 end of each of them big enough to put the wire stick into. I used a little wood glue to ensure that the sticks would stay in the handles.
After the handles dried I painted a yellow strip down the middle of each for everyone to write their names on there own stick with a sharpie.

They really turned out great! After using them, the only thing I would have done different is to make them a little longer. We had a great time using them at our annual "decorate Mama T's Christmas tree party".

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