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Wooohoooo! It's finally up!!! [Carly jumps up and down while clapping her hands]
A month ago, I created 4 different pieces of silhouette art using real photos of Justin and I and gave him the art for Valentine's Day. By "gave him the art," I mean that I showed him the files and said "I have no idea how to get these printed but here you go..."
Turns out, all we needed was $34.99 and a Zazzle order. We ordered custom-size prints, having sized the art to fit the black Ribba frames we bought at Ikea. 7 days later, Zazzle came through, and a huge cardboard tube was delivered to my cubicle at work.
See how the wall looked before? It was NAKED! NAKED, I tell you! This is not dramatic exaggeration... it truly was bare naked.
Here's another "BEFORE" shot... because of the intricate artwork on the right side of the bed, we worried about over-crowding the narrow space. Not that my mess of jackets, purses, and computer crap wasn't already creating clutter...
With the Zazzle order in hand, we broke open the Ikea frames. Okay, no, we didn't actually break them (which is surprising... because they came from Ikea... ba dum bum ching!).
We opened the frames, then centered each print on the mat that came inside the frames. We had ordered these prints to be almost an inch larger, in both width and height, than the cut out in the mat.
After centering on the matte, we taped each print on all 4 sides to
ensure that it wouldn't slip over time (because we could already tell
that these Ikea frames are going to be a hassle to re-open once we've bent the metal into place to close them).
We closed each of the frames, wrapping the wire around the prongs and tucking it into the frame to hide the ends.
Before hanging, we stood above the bed for a few minutes, staring down and trying to determine how to best hang the art to make it feel most balanced. I would love to tell you that I used a really scientific method to make these decisions... but it seemed to come down to simple preferences. Which ones do we like more? Which ones do you want closer to you? Etc.
We also made sure to keep "Rain" and "Moonlight" diagonal from each other, as their colors were the most similar and we didn't want to make one side or another feel too similar.
Here's Justin getting ready to hang the art. This photo is pretty much in the post just to illustrate our temporary obsession with the show True Blood. No, this was not staged. Yes, the disk was really just sitting there. It's like it was meant to happen.
We wanted all four pieces to hang in two rows of two (see how we set them out on the bed in the images above?).
What means we had to measure. A lot. The space between each frame had to be equal. I'll be honest here, I had nothing to do with this. I don't have the patience to do this kind of measuring. I'm just not detail oriented enough. Justin measured where to place each frame in order to get the same distance between them all. He marked those spots off, hammered in a nail, then hung each frame using the wire attached to the back.
What's that noise? It's the sound of me breathing a sigh of relief; the art is finally up! Not only is it up, but it looks great.
As far as the coloring, you'll notice they're all fairly muted colors (except for the sea green). The brown/gray ties in quite nicely with the dark pillows and sheets on the bed, and the taupe-ish color goes nicely with the comforter, does it not?
I'm also pretty pumped about the thickness of the black frames. We have been working on some DIY lamps that will have black lampshades, which will hopefully help pull the black color through the room.
Ah, remember my sigh of relief? Here's where I was as I breathed it. Those are my feet. My pajama pants. My half-painted-totally-chipped toes. And my view.
For those of you who are keeping score, check out all of the DIY madness that's gone down in this bedroom so far!
Talk about making a small space seem big. Great idea and execution for the 'you made it' wall art. Love the way you were able to write over your pictures and add neat arrows and lines. Did you blog about that somewhere?
ReplyDeleteJoy
I love these! And awesome that your naked wall is now clothed. :-) Great job, and thanks for linking up with the Winter Pinterest Challenge
ReplyDeleteErin @ The Great Indoors