Love Letters

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After hanging the book baskets in Emma and Owen's room, the wall space above them was looking a bit bleak.  I wanted to make some large art to hang above them and came across some inspiration from The Green Palette's instagram feed.

Brent and I set out to make something similar by first sketching our letter templates onto a piece of 1/4 inch plywood.  Using the table saw and a jig saw, Brent cut them out and I sanded them.

Now that we had a template, we wanted to layer a different type of wood on top.  Luckily, we had a 6 foot pallet in our shop!  Brent disassembled it and cut the pallet boards into a few different widths.

To attach the pallet boards to the template, we used a little glue, then laid our piece of pallet board on top, flipped it over and put a nail through it with the air gun.

When all the letters were done, I gave them a coat of Walnut stain.

I wanted them to have a little color so Emma and I brushed on three different colors of blue/grey paint.

 We put the darkest color over all of the horizontal lines to make them stand out more.

We alternated the other two colors of blue/grey on each plank.

After the paint was dry, I sanded each letter to remove some paint and expose the texture of the pallet wood.

 A quick coat of Van Dyke Brown Glaze always seems to tie everything together.  In the photo below, the left side has been glazed and the right has not.

The letters didn't feel finished at this point, so we chose to outline each letter with a small piece of trim.  After the trim was applied, I brushed on a coat of sealer to darken the wood tone a bit.

To hang them, we nailed in some of these clips...

Hanging them proved to be a bit tricky...but we finally got them level.

 I didn't plan on this, but the colors in the letters actually matches the color of the baskets perfectly.

 I guess you could say we all "LOVE" our new art :)

Holiday Button Art

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These unfinished cabinet door frames have been laying around in our basement for over a year and I was finally determined to do something with them.  Photos on Pinterest of people using buttons to spell out letters had been popping up in my feed, so I thought I could spell the word JOY with my three frames.  

Here's where I can save you a ton of time...since my door frames didn't have panel inserts, I had to make my own panel out of some scrap sheetrock we had laying around.  Plywood would have been a better option but we didn't have any and I wasn't going to waste the fuel to go to the home improvement store when the sheetrock that was laying around would work just as well.  Lucky for you though, you could use regular old cabinet doors with a panel still intact!

I had this really great turquoise burlap that I wanted to use, but burlap has a very loose knit making it especially see through.  So before I wrapped my burlap around the squares of sheetrock, I painted the sheetrock with a few coats of a similar turquoise paint that we had on hand, this way the white sheetrock wouldn't show through the burlap.  The wood frames got a few coats of antique white paint and some van dyke brown glaze to age them.

After the burlap was wrapped around the sheetrock, I placed it in the painted wood frame.

I don't have a fancy letter cutting machine, so to make the JOY letters, I simply printed each letter off on my printer and cut them out.  Since the letter would be painted red, I traced the letter pattern with a red marker to create the outline.

 Here's what my letter looked like after tracing it onto the burlap.

Using red metallic acrylic paint, I filled in the letter.  This is an important step because if you just use buttons without having the letter painted underneath, the letter will not look very solid because the buttons can't possibly cover all of the space.

Joanne's sells large packs of different colored buttons - I grabbed both of these packs so I could get some different sizes.

Before I started hot glueing anything, I laid some buttons out on the letters to practice a bit.  Some people layer the buttons, others just do a single layer.  I opted for the single layer when it was actually time to glue them down - mostly for my safety since I burnt my fingers about 100 times in the process with the hot glue.

After all three of my letter were complete, Brent used hardware like you see below to hook the frames to one another.

 We love our new holiday art and more importantly, we love that we did it for about $10!

Babies + Beads = Bad News

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Towards the end of December, my sister and brother-in law will be welcoming their first baby (screaming and excessive hand clapping) and clearly, I couldn't be more excited!  Beings that they have an abundance of self control - opposite of myself - they have chosen to find out their baby's gender at delivery.  According to completely unscientific reports, about 40% of couples take the same approach as my sister....we'll call it the "wait and see."  For the record, I think it's a girl.

Since they don't know the baby's sex, the nursery is gender neutral with grays and yellows, whites and wood tones.  Anne has found a few cute things throughout her pregnancy with elephants on them to decorate the nursery, so when I stumbled up these elephants at World Market, I immediately thought - BABY MOBILE!

I picked up an embroidery hoop (after bringing the hoop home, I stained and sealed it) and some some yarn to hang the elephants from.

To begin, I painted a metal washer with some turquoise acrylic paint and then hung it from our dining room chandelier.  This way, I could suspend the embroidery hoop from it so I could tie each elephant on the mobile.

With my washer dangling from the light fixture, I cut two equal lengths of yarn, fed them through the washer and tied them to the embroidery hoop with a few knots.  Now we were ready to start attaching elephants.

Before we could get started on the elephants, we had to address one small problem - or rather, about 75 small problems.  Beads.  Lots of them.  Which meant the string of elephants needed to be deconstructed and re-assembled WITHOUT said beads. 

I started by snipping the threads that held all of the elephants together to discard the beads.

With the beads out of the way, I used some gold thread and an embroidery needle to tie a knot which would suspend the elephant - side note here: had NO idea what an embroidery needle even was until I found one in my sewing kit and realized it would work perfectly for this project!

 Tie a couple knots here.

 And you should end up with an elephant swinging by a string.

 At this point, I just started tying the elephants onto the embroidery hoop until it was balanced and full.

I would have loved to have taken some photos of the mobile hanging above baby's crib - but my sister lives 4 hours away, so that ain't happenin'.  Luckily, there is a hook above Brent's side of the bed, so he gets to stare at a baby mobile while he goes to sleep each night until we can deliver it to it's rightful owner.

Hopefully baby likes it and doesn't develop a life long fear of elephants!