5-Minute Wall Art Project

As many of your are, I am in love with Instagram on my iPhone but hadn’t found a way to use any of those little square pictures in real life. Then recently, I stumbled across PostalPix, which is genius. It is an app that you can download that allows you to order your Instagram pictures to be delivered to you by mail. I love that it can all be done right through an app. It was so easy and at less than 30 cents each for a 4×4 print, you can’t beat that. So, I ordered some for my travel journal projects (I’ll share those soon). Then an hour later, I wanted to order more to try my hand at a DIY idea I had. So two orders down and a few days later… I had some pictures in my mailbox! I gathered my materials and was ready to go! I grabbed two IKEA Nyjjta frames, some mini clothespins I already had, some wire, the pictures and my manual staple gun.

Image

I removed the plastic front (glass if you are using a frame more expensive that $1.99) and the cardboard backing so I was left with just the white frame. I then cut a piece of wire and stapled it to the back of the frame and cut off the excess wire.
Image

I also made sure to bend back the black metal flaps that used to hold the backing on rather than breaking them off, just in case I want to use these as regular frames in the future.

ImageThen it was as easy as using some mini clothespins to hold some of the pictures. Truly the hardest part was deciding which pictures to put up first. I like that I can easily change out what pictures I keep up there. Yay for ever-changing art! One thing to note is that I didn’t have any picture brackets so I cheated and just stapled more wire to the top to be able to hang them on the wall. I have plans to change it to real brackets, but if the stapled wire holds up… I will probably forget.

Image

Image

Don’t mind how empty the rest of that wall is… I’m working on it…

But, see! Simple, easy and really quick… my favorite kind of project :)

About these ads

WVU in the Family

Growing up in Massachusetts… I never thought that West Virginia would become such a big part of my life. Four years ago my younger brother Tim decided to go to West Virginia University. Now, four years later he is a graduate and my youngest brother has started there. As I mentioned in this post about Tim’s WVU graduation… I really love visiting down there. It is just really beautiful and so much fun. I know that Tim had an incredible four years there and now Greg is doing just the same. I even put together a WVU graduation party to start the fun for him. Now that Greg is down there, I hope to visit soon. I have great memories of visiting Tim over the years…

 

I know I will also have a great time visiting Greg at some point as well. We took this picture before Tim’s graduation to start our pictures at WVU together…

Actually one time, Greg and I took a road trip to visit Tim and decided to make a documentary of our travels. It is hilarious. Well we think so at least…

Well, recently I stumbled across 1Canoe2 and their beautiful state letterpress prints. As I was looking through each state, I found West Virginia and knew that I needed it. I miss both of my brothers terribly as Greg is in West Virginia, Tim is in Massachusetts and I am in Connecticut. Regardless, we are all still incredibly close. This past weekend, my father and Tim went to WVU to visit Greg and to catch the first football game of the season… so I figured this post would be fitting as I just got my print in the mail from 1Canoe2! Into a frame it went…

 

I hope everyone has had a great Labor Day weekend! Enjoy what is left of it!

 

 

Printing on Burlap

I really love the rustic shabby look of burlap. I especially love it because it is really inexpensive to buy. I bought some recently for 3.99/yd and then had a coupon on top of that. Great, huh? Recently I have seen a lot of people printing on burlap on Pinterest so I wanted to give it a try. Every tutorial I found used bonding material on the back of the burlap to adhere it to paper to feed through the printer. I really didn’t want to buy special bonding material I would have to iron on for a few reasons. I didn’t know how well it would really work and I didn’t want to spend money on it in case it didn’t turn out like I had hoped. Instead I decided to come up with my own plan :)

First I opened up a word document and played around with different fonts and sizes. I finally settled on Matilde for the font and made it a size that would fit a 5×7 frame.

Then came time for some testing. I decided that in order to print on burlap I would try to use spray adhesive to adhere the burlap to a piece of card stock. I just sprayed the card stock, laid the burlap down and cut it slightly smaller than the paper.

And wouldn’t you know… it worked perfectly!

Ah! I was so thrilled with how it looked. Honestly it was as simple as feeding it into my printer and pressing print.

From there I just took the burlap off of the sticky paper and cut it to fit in my 5×7 frames and they came out just wonderfully :)

I have a plan for these frames that I will be sharing soon. Be excited.  Oh and by the way, those frames are from Ikea!

So yes… that was my SUPER quick and easy way to print on burlap. How adorable is it? I’m thinking I need to make some printed burlap art for my laundry room now….

Let me know if you try it!

 

Disclaimer – My dear Brett said that I should probably let all of you know that each printer is different. I personally didn’t have a problem printing on burlap but I can’t guarantee that your printer will like this project :)

A kitchen deserves some art too!

In our place, the kitchen and living room are open to one another which I really love. This made picking a color scheme really easy because I needed to use it for both rooms. We originally opted for blues and browns (because Brett didn’t want anything too girly) but the room felt too dark to me. I decided to add some pops of yellow and it has made all the difference. Nothing could be more cheery that yellow, right?

Well our kitchen has some shelves with knick knacks but they are mostly blue/brown. I recently added a fun print in yellow to the mix to break it up. I downloaded the print and modge podged it (I’m making up words) onto a canvas. Here is that tutorial I posted about it recently! In general really like the idea of adding decor to the kitchen because I feel like it is the most frequently used room but typically the least decorated. I decided I would share some of the art I currently have in the kitchen. Maybe this will inspire you to add some fun to your kitchen :)

While perusing Michaels a few months back I came across these adhesive stencils. They are kitchen labels meant to label jars and canisters, I’m sure. Unfortunately, I change things so often that I don’t trust myself to paint a label on any jar around here (instead I used chalkboard labels!). However, the stencils were really cute and with my 40% off coupon I bought them and knew I would figure out some sort of plan.

I finally decided to paint a canvas with the stencils and hang it in the kitchen over our back door. The stencils are really great because they are adhesive and stay sticky even after you wash them in the sink.

I placed the words where I wanted them and used a sponge brush to paint in the stencil.

Once it was done, it looked a little empty so I decided to take another stencil I had to add a little extra pizzazz :)

Then hung it up above the door… after letting it dry of course! Easy as that!

On the other side of the kitchen I had some frames I needed prints for. I had bought some frames at Ikea that were unfinished and then spray painted them (I’m on a spray painting kick lately). In the kitchen, I decided to use the darker blue frame and the yellow frame (be on the lookout for posts about the other goodies you see in the picture below.. yay!)

The darker blue was Krylon Indoor/Outdoor spray paint in Global Blue and the yellow was Krylon Indoor/Outdoor spray paint in Sun Yellow. I recently used Sun Yellow in this DIY tray post as well! For this, I just used a few coats of primer spray paint and then a few coats of the colored spray paint and they were good to go! I also sprayed them with a coat of clear acrylic spray paint which gives it a nice finished glossy coat. Then I was off to find some prints to fill these newly painted frames.

I of course turned to Pinterest to find some kitchen-esque prints. There were so many great free printables that I found on there. I was originally going to buy some prints on Etsy but when I stumbled upon some fantastic free prints… I opted to go that route instead. Why not, right? Both of the prints I settled on were from Big D & Me. Jennifer shared some adorable kitchen printables she made available after using them on her own kitchen wall. Here are the two I picked…

{via}

{via}

These both are incredibly silly and make me giggle. I mean why take life so seriously when you can use food jokes to “turnip the beet”. Even now I am laughing… I know, I am a huge fool.

Here how they look in the kitchen right now…

Don’t they just make you happy?

Definitely check out Big D & Me! She has some really great projects. I hope this inspires you to add some fun to your kitchen too!