With 2013 here, my current life is back to normal with constant school, work, and spending time with my handsome love. When the fall semester came to an end, I was the happiest girl alive to have a few weeks of break to get ready for the holiday season. Spending time with my family and Austin was SO nice after being so busy in the hustle and bustle of the previous few months. Although I love the holiday season, it's nice when it's over and your space can be cleaned up of all the holiday decorations, smells, and wrapping paper. Now that January is here, I want to start the year off right and make 2013 different from 2012.
I love to be creative. There is just something so amazing from being able to work on something you love and see the end results. For me, cooking and sprucing up areas that need work in Austin and I's space are such stress relievers. I know that men like to make jokes about women and their "rightful" place in the kitchen, but my thing is, I LOVE to be in the kitchen. I have often times told Austin that I just need to relieve some stress and cook or bake something to blow of some steam. He doesn't complain, since my stress relief often ends in him getting to indulge in yummy food :)). Crafting also is another stress reliever for me that allows me to create things I don't normally get to.
Last week, I was in an awful mood. It seemed like everything was just going wrong and I had no idea how to cope with any of it. I felt (and did) like curling up in a ball and just laying under the covers of my bed, never to come out. Then one morning, I woke up and just had to do something with my busy, over stimulated mind.
Being an avid Pinterester, I am always pinning and looking at different craft projects that people do. Sometimes I can spend hours just scrolling through different ideas that people have come up with for their creative minds. Always pinning, but never doing, I always have different ideas up my sleeve. The morning that I woke up and just had to do something with my crazed mood, I rushed to the art store, and finally bought stuff to put my crazy mind to work. It was the most odd feeling ever, like something was literally pushing me out the door to accomplish something creative that day.
This was the end product of my crazed mind. I think that I found that I can be quite productive when I need to relieve some stress!
If you are an avid Pinterester, I am sure you have seen these ideas before:
Seeing these ideas and not really hating, nor loving either idea, I decided to mix the two together for my project. I don't know about you, but I think mine turned out great! It really spruced up my room at my parent's house and it made my room look more mature and brought together all the colors of my space together in one collective art piece.
At the art store, I flew in knowing exactly what I needed and wanted. It also helped that I had a gift card to make the purchases since I started without any of the necessary materials :).
What I needed for this project:
- Canvas - Canvas can be pretty expensive. After some careful looking, I found a value pack with 2 in them for a pretty good price. I bought two different sizes of these value packs for about $10.
- Paint - I spent a few minutes looking at different paint shades. I knew what colors I wanted, but the shades were the important part. I unscrewed the cap of the paint bottle in the store to see the actual shade because some of them looked different from the bottle color. A little brighter or darker than what I wanted, so it's a good thing I checked. In the end, I picked a green, blue, grey, white, and red color. Paint can vary in prices, but with these on sale, I spent about $5.
- Paint Brushes - I picked cheapy ones because I knew this project didn't require expensive or nice brushes.
- Wood chips in the shape of letters - After spending a few minutes searching around the store for them, I found them where they keep all the wood boxes and wood shapes you can paint yourself. I bought two packs because I wouldn't have enough letters for what I wanted to spell for my project. These were the most expensive part, about $4 a box for 60 letters.
- Tape
I started out by painting each canvas with a couple coats of paint. I wanted to make sure that none of the white canvas showed, so I also painted the sides too. Make sure while doing this to paint underneath the back of the canvas a little bit (where the wood of the canvas is showing) so that you can't see any of the white showing when it is hung up.
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| Painting.... |
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| Even more painting.... |
After they were touched up and done drying, this was the product. This was my first time painting with canvas and it was pretty easy. While waiting for the canvas to dry, I took an Emory Board file and filed the imperfections out of the wood letters I needed. It makes it so much easier to paint them when they are not rigid. I used white paint to paint the letters and used about 3 coats so they showed up really white against these colors on my canvas.
I chose the words, "Inspire" "Create" and "Succeed". I think that I needed to learn that when I am inspired, I really should create something to succeed in whatever it is I want to succeed in instead of saying, "I'll do it some other time," or "Maybe later". I think these are words that we can all live by.
My next step, shown in the above picture, was to connect the letters to my canvas. I wanted to connect them in a way so that if I wanted to re-arrange them at another time or re-work the orientation of my canvas, the letters were removable. I thought it would have been a cool idea to use magnets to connect the letters, so there was no tape having to be involved, but the magnets weren't powerful enough and I had to resort to tape.
I doubled the tape so that it was sticky on both sides and cut it into little pieces so that they couldn't be seen when looking at the final product. I attached the tape to the back of the letters and stuck them on my canvas according to the look I was going for.
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| This lovely idea was inspired by a Christmas Ornament Exchange this year. Austin's sister Rachel made one similar to this as an ornament for our tree! :) |
I also wanted to incorporate these roses since they are interesting to look at and if done right can look quite vintage. Many people use up cycled old book pages to make these. Since I wanted my project to go in the direction of a more classic clean look, I decided to use old photocopied sheet music. There were no original works harmed in the process of this DIY :). Also, I couldn't wrap my mind about destroying any of my book pages in my books, so this was the next best thing. I also have a lot of music themed pieces of art in my room as well and figured it would be a nice way of tying them together with this project.
My next challenge, after everything was attached to the canvas, was to hang them. These canvas didn't come with wall hanging attachments, so I improvised and hung them with some good ol' nails and a hammer. The wood on the backside of the canvas makes a good way to hold them on the wall as long as you don't have anyone to mess with them and puncture the outside canvas with the nails on the inside.
Here you go! Original wall art that anyone can make and it looks clean and mature with the canvas presentation. I encourage anyone who has an artistic need and a wall that needs some modern sprucing up to make these! These words can be changed to decorate a baby's room, display photographs, or even just paint on a painting! The thing I like about this project is since the letters are removable, they can be re-used together or separately with a different theme :)
I have also decided that since this project turned out so great that I am going to do a different project each month. I know at some point during each month I will need to do something constructive besides work and school work to keep my mind occupied heehee :). I am thinking some new recipes or other home decorating ideas! I can't wait to share my projects with you :) I am excited to see what a year of DIY looks like!
