Artwork for Wedding Gallery Wall

These are just a couple of very quick little projects I did with the intention of using them as part of a wedding "gallery wall" I'm planning on creating when we finally get into our new house. Our wedding day was amazing, and we have some really wonderful, personal photos that were taken by our friends that I think need to be displayed in a special way. So, to create something a bit different than your usual "posed wedding photo in a frame on the mantelpiece" I have been gathering together some small craft projects to complement the professional photos we have had done in acrylic and on canvas, and the candid shots I plan on putting in funky frames. I don't want the wall to be all photos, so to break it up a bit I came up with these little canvases....

This is a quote from sonnet 116, which we had as a reading at our wedding.

And this is pretty self explanatory :)

I buy canvases from the euro store for €1.50/€2.00 each. I found these stickers in guineys for €1.50 per pack, 2 packs didn't quite do both canvases, so as you can see in the photo above, I had some gaps. I just painted the top half, removed the letters I needed and re-used them on the bottom half.

So after I laid out the letters I painted over them with a sample pot of colortrend paint I had. Most of the pics and art I'm going to use for the wall are black/white/grey. Once I had painted over the whole canvas I got a tweezers and peeled off the stickers (which I will save, cos I'm that cheap!)

The "happily ever after" is just stickers on canvas, simple! And if I ever want to change it I can just peel off the stickers and do something else.

And this is how they turned out, I'm quite happy with them :)

 A quick and easy little project but I think they'll look great up on the wall amongst our photos.

Linda

Quote Cushions

I have been bitten by the typographical bug! All of a sudden I am aware of all the wonderful quote that I love and it would seem that I am on a mission to have as many of them in my house as possible! To that end, after finding these small cushions in B&Q for just €2.95 each (they have them in lots of colours) I decided to attempt some fabric-art. So I went to Silkes on Catherine St and found this textile marker for €1.95....

It did the job admirably.I did both cushions with it and I'm sure I'll get a couple more out of it, it shows no signs of running out thus far :) It did come in other colors but just primary shades.

I first tried out a "once upon a time" design for Em's room. I just went freehand with it, and I'm quite happy with it, but if I'd just had a bit of patience and measured out where the letters should go then that "a" wouldn't be wonky...grrr.....

I then decided I'd try a Yeats quote for a cushion for our bed (I'm aware it's not "for" but "because" in the poem, it wouldn't fit!). I'm not as happy with this one, it's pretty wonky. I really want a set of alphabet stamps but thus far I've been too cheap to buy some online, but given the amount of these type of projects I've been doing over the last couple of weeks I reckon I'll just have to bite the bullet and order a set.

Here they are again, in all their wonky glory!

Duckegg Blue Painted Dresser

I realised something recently, and it's one of those things that, once you notice it you just can't un-notice it(that bachelor's degree in English obviously did me a lot of good!). 

What I realised is this....I moved out of home eleven years ago, and since then I have lived in three different apartments, none of which were decorated in anything like my style and none of which could be altered, and I am TIRED of it! 

The sooner we get into our own house the better. I never again want to see a beige curtain or a black pleather couch! (Seriously, is there a shop somewhere in Ireland that caters exclusively for landlords and stocks nothing but white paint and black leatherette furniture??)

Now, possibly due to some sort of self-preservation impulse this had never really bothered me before, but when we started seriously looking at houses I started thinking about how I would decorate said house when it was mine, and this in turn led me to realise just how bland my current abode is and made me itch to do something about it. However, we aren't allowed to paint or anything, plus I knew we would be moving in the near future, so any changes would have to be through the things we owned that would come with us when that happened.

This all led me to........MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT PAINTING FURNITURE!!! (dun dun duuuuuunnnn).

Terrible photo, and yes, those are flowers painted on it, lovely.

We had this little dresser in our bedroom that I bought in Heirlooms when we first moved in here. I picked it out because it was wood, it was in budget and it was small enough to move easily, its aesthetic qualities didn't really come in to it (I know, I can't understand it now either, all I can say is I was young and hadn't found my style feet yet.....that's also how I explain the nose ring and pink highlights coincidentally!). 

So I decided to paint it, and planned to ad some new bedding and artwork after in order to dress up our bedroom a little bit.

My tools, on top of another little project.

This is the paint I used, it's colortrend, I got it in Daly's on William St and it was €10.95 for 500ml, which was enough to do the dresser, the blanket box you can see in the last pic, and several other small projects.

I used sandpaper, a mini roller kit, a paintbrush, some turquoise colortrend paint, some gold acrylic paint and some spray polyurethane ( I wanted a tin of polycrylic, like all the bloggers I like seem to us, but Woodies and Homebase looked at me like I was speaking Japanese when I asked for it!).

I took the drawers out, gave the whole thing a quick rub with sandpaper and a good wipe down, then just slapped two coats of the paint on it. Then I went back and painted the knobs and the accents on the doors and drawers in gold acrylic paint. I only did one coat of this and you can see the blue paint underneath to a certain extent, but I like the effect it gives. 

Then after it had dried I sprayed the whole thing with a coat of polyeuethane to protect it (it's my dressing table so it gets a lot of abuse from makeup and curling tongs) and that was it!

Ta-dah!....I would appreciate it if you could pretend that you can't see that mess in the background, thanks.

The colour is a little bit greener looking than I had thought it would be, possibly because it was originally a cream colour? I would have liked it to be a more vibrant turquoise, but overall I'm happy with it, and it's a vast improvement on what it was!

What do you think?

Linda

Button Letter Art

Pinterest has opened up a whole new world to me. I can't believe it now, but just a few months ago the idea that you could decorate your home using items that you had made or updated yourself just hadn't occurred to me (I know right?!). So, once the veil was lifted I found myself itching to...paint....glue....decoupage.....anything! And I did.......a lot (my husband was alarmed at the regularity with which I arrived home with new and unusual "supplies", he even had the nerve to laugh at my glue gun).

One of the projects I really wanted to try first was some button letter art like those I had seen and loved on ETSY. I decided to do one for Em's room, thinking it would look great in the gallery wall I had planned for the blank wall above her dresser.

Here's what I ended up with.......

It was really easy. I bought a bag of mixed buttons from silkes for €4.95 (and I'll get at least 6 more of these out of that one bag, so everyone I know who has kids, act surprised when I give you one alright?), a piece of nice A4 paper for .90c, and the frame was on sale in tesco for €6 (I may or may not have bought 10 of them!), and it's what I'd call a deep one, that is, it has space between the back and the glass, so you can put something 3D in it.

All I did then was choose one of the artworks I liked best on pinterest and copy it! I laid out the buttons first, mixing up the colours and sizes until I came up with a layout that I liked, and then I pulled out my new favourite thing....the GLUE GUN! :D....and started gluing. I did the top and bottom lines first to make sure it didn't go wonky on me, and when I was done I went back and added a few larger buttons over the top to make it really stand out.

Then I simply used pritt stick to glue the frame mat/border thingy to my paper and framed it, done! Cost me a grand total of about €9 and took me less than an hour :)

I Blame Pinterest.....

So, my husband caught me taking photos of some of my craft projects recently and remarked that "this is starting to look suspiciously like you're starting a blog". A month, 4 projects and way too many hours spent reading other peoples blogs later and here I am!

Up until about 2 months ago I had never been on pinterest, neither was I aware that there was such a thing as a craft/DIY blog or that I was soon to become hopelessly addicted to them, but I'm so glad that my eyes have been opened and now, good idea or not I'm going to start documenting some of my own attempts at home-beautification!

So, here goes.......