Wedding Cornhole (Trial and Error)

I saw this on Pintrest and/or Etsy.  My fiance and I are planning an outdoor patio cocktail hour and I while I have never played cornhole, this looked like so much fun for the cocktail hour (or a good break from dancing and music during the reception).  While the boards on Etsy are super cute, I didn't really want to pay that kind of money for a game I'm not sure i'll use after my wedding so I decided to try to do it myself.

Here's my inspiration picture:


I started with unfinished cornhole boards (no pictures of the unfinished boards) from the hardware store (i live in a college town so they were easy to come by and cost about $100).  You could make your own if you have the tools (there are directions online if you google it).  I used spray paint (because I had the navy blue left over from other projects) but in hindsight i think regular paint would have been a better choice.  I wanted one board in each of my main wedding colors so I painted one pink all over and one navy all over.  I thought that my fiance and I could use a light in a dark room to trace our silhouettes but we are not artists and that did NOT work...it was quite funny to see our outlines though.  Then I got the bright idea to take pictures of our profiles, put them in black and white on my computer and have them enlarged into 2 foot X 3 foot b&w prints at staples for about $7 total.  Then I just cut out the face.

Profile Photograph

Photo Print Out

Photo Cut Out (back side)

Cut Out of 2x3 picture print out (back side)

After I had the stencils ready, I sprayed the outsides of the cut outs with adhesive spray, let it dry for about a minute and put it on the cornhole boards (i did one at a time).  Then I sprayed the inside of the stencil.  The one of my fiance didn't work on the first try b/c the edges bled.  I tried to sand off the navy which didn't work so then I tried to paint over the navy with pink, that didn't work either.  I still had the inside of the cut out so I sprayed that with adhesive, let it dry a bit, and put it on the board lined up with what was already on the board.  Then I sprayed the pink around the edges until it covered up the navy.  It worked!  I think I didn't have enough adhesive on the paper the first time (though its difficult b/c i only wanted a temporary bond).  When the paint was dry, i pulled the paper off and saw the results :-).  I had to touch both boards up a little bit so I sprayed a paint brush and cleaned up the lines.  Once the boards were done, I used some tuile that I had from a previous project to make a bow for my hair and a bow tie for my fiance's neck.  I used super glue to attach the bows (its not the strongest hold and they may fall when hit by a bunch of bean bags but I couldn't think of a better way to attach the bows).  Finally, I got the corn bags on Etsy with our wedding date and monogram for about $30 (pictured in the final product picture at the bottom).

The messy first try at my fiance's board

The finished product