What is is about keys anyway? If there is one thing it seems we hate to throw away, it’s an old key.

And the funny thing is that we are at the point of throwing it away only because we have no clue what it goes to anymore. But yet it has to go into the coffee can marked “Old Keys”… Is it because we have been taught from an early age not to lose our keys and we are trying to be responsible? Or is it because way down deep inside we are afraid that if we throw an old key away, someone will find it who DOES know what it’s for and break into our house, car, locker, etc.?  (I myself kind of vote for the latter…) But having read on Pinterest how you can make wind chimes out of old keys, and having just found a coffee can full of them, I thought this would be the perfect project for my (soon to be) whimsical garden.These keys had been saved by my dad, and I found them while helping my mom organize a room over the weekend. I’m sure that even as a family of five we could never have actually owned that many keys. I can only think a lot of them must have been collected during Daddy’s “metal detector days.” But as far as whimsical wind chimes go, I had just come into a gold mine.The first thing to do is paint them keys with bright, whimsical colors. I used the acrylic paints you get for 59 cents at the craft store. I noticed the yellow and the orange didn’t cover very well. The flat paints seemed to cover better than the gloss. All the colors required several layers of paint.

Afterwards I hung them outside and sprayed them with clear acrylic coating. Not only did it brighten up the flat paint, but it will also keep the colors from fading in the sun. Now all I have to do is decide how I want to put them together in wind chime form. (That’s why this is Part 1.)

Stay tuned…