I found a DIY ukulele kit on sale and thought it would be a fun project. Originally, I was thinking of painting it with galaxies, but decided to use our images from high altitude ballooning to decorate it.

I used wood glue to attach the neck of the instrument.

Walgreens Photo now has one-hour posters that are peel and stick. I found a 50% off coupon for the printing and, using three shots from our various ballooning flights, had 11×16 posters printed.

I cut down one of them to an appropriate size and peeled and stuck it on the front of the ukulele.

I used a small blade to cut around the outside.

It looked great!

I did the same for the back.

And the sides.

I painted the back of the neck with white paint. I used tempura paint because I was planning to decoupage the whole thing so I wasn’t worried about it flaking off. It took a few coats because it really soaked into the wood.

A couple coats of Mod Podge were applied and allowed to dry.

Lastly, the hardware was added.

The instructions that came with the kit left something to be desired so I had to do some internet searching to figure out which strings went where and how to tune it.

It ended up being a fun project and resulted in a one-of-a-kind high-altitude-ballooning-decorated musical instrument.