Peacock butterfly

Remember my butterfly specimens that I blogged about for my living room gallery wall?

I finally got around to crafting a Blue Morpho inspired art piece.

I used a dollar store frame, silver spray paint, six peacock feathers, and some aqua filler feathers.  I cut out a butterfly shape on cardstock, sprayed it with Spray Adhesive, stuck it to the glass, and sprayed it with silver paint.  Quickly remove the butterfly shape before the paint dries to avoid cementing it to the glass.  Once the paint was dried, I arranged the feathers underneath, and then carefully replaced the frame backing.  My butterfly isn't perfectly symetrical, but I think it's kind of charming.  I really love it with the navy blue wall, don't you?

Emery and Ohlin's finished bedroom!!

I got these bunk beds on craigslist for $30! The bedding is an Alexander Girard design and I made the paper bunting over the bed.

Image in from an advertisement from 1954.

The room is painted Teal Zeal and there is a racing stripe of chalkboard paint that goes around the entire room.

We installed a new sputnik light fixture!

In the corner we created a reading nook with vinyl gutter bookshelves, two reading lamps, and a Plycraft rocker and ottoman!

The pillow is also Alexander Girard, and we have a little tulip table next to the chair for water and extra books.

The framed poster is from the National Park series, by Charley Harper, of the Rocky Mtns.

The second framed poster is another Charley Harper, this time for Glacier National Park in Alaska.  The whole room has a triangle/chevron motif. 

I bought some peg legs for the second dresser, but I haven't gotten around to installing them yet.  This framed poster is one of my favorite things in the room! We chose The Empire Strikes Back print because Emery loves Darth Vader, but I would hang any of the series in my home.  Check them out here. 

The poster color ended up being almost an exact match to the paint color, what a happy coincidence!

Who needs a teddy, when you can snuggle with the Dark Lord?

Our newly painted bedroom

I finally picked the WPA print that I wanted to hang in our new green striped hallway.

It's the perfect transitional piece for the hallway because we just repainted our bedroom Darkest Navy (Behr)!

Goodbye plummy/scarlet!

The color is really rich and gorgeous.  We happen to have a big bedroom that gets lots of natural light, so I wasn't worried about "shrinking" the room with such a bold color.  I'll post pics of the entire room after I frame my new screen print.  I'm waiting for Hobby Lobby to put all their frames on 50% clearance. Seriously, does anyone ever buy anything there for full price?

Vintage Western Electric extension phone

My birthday was in mid-March and I bought myself a "new" phone for our kitchen.  We had a super cute kettle phone, but I hated having it take up room on our counter top and the cords were driving me crazy.  I got on ebay and started looking at rotary wall phones from the 50s-60s.  I fell in love with a 1959 pink Western Electric, but I had to drop out of the bidding...it ended up selling for $160!!!  Eventually I found a sea foam green or "mint" green W.E. that had been refurbished.  I think it looks even better than the pink one would have, so all is right with the universe.  Hello, cutie!

I have a framed copy of this advertisement hanging in my kitchen too!

It says: "Why you need a kitchen extension phone

 First, It's a great help in running the house.  Your kitchen extension is near your shopping lists, and at your finger tips for emergency calls to the plumber and other repairmen.   Next, it saves you trouble.  Biscuits won't burn, or a pot boil over, because a telephone call took you out of the kitchen.  And while you handle important household calls, you can keep a watchful eye on playing children.  It saves you steps, too.  When it rings you're right there to say "Hello."  Since the kitchen is where you spend so many hours of your busy day, it makes sense to have a telephone handy.  (Your husband, like you, will find it one of your most useful phones.)  And when all your work is done, it's easy and fun to take a break and chat with a friends on your handy kitchen extension.  The comfort, privacy and protection of extension phones throughout your house- where you work, play, or sleep- cost surprisingly little.  To order extensions, just call your Bell Telephone business office."

'Cause that's how I like to spend my day; slaving away in the kitchen AND gossiping!  I wonder who she is talking about while her little urchins eat an entire bowl of chocolate?!!?

March color challenge

This month's chosen color is GREEN!! A little deja-vu for me, since I picked it last month for my stenciled table, but no worries.  I seriously love green!  The area leading into our upstairs master bedroom needed some attention.  Call it a hallway, landing...vestibule, whatever it is, I think I made it awesome! I may need to paint the doors white now, don't you think?

Here is the before:

...And then there were green stripes! 

The dark green is (Behr) Herbal Garden and the light stripes are (Behr) Asparagus.

I'm sewing a new curtain for the linen closet and will hang some WPA art on the wall with the light switch.  If I waited to post pics until after EVERYTHING was done, then you fine folks would never see anything. ;)

Scrabble pillows

Scrabble pillows are everywhere these days!  I discovered them on etsy awhile ago and thought they were really clever.  The problem is once you spell out a word, you're dropping serious money!  I figured they would be pretty easy to DIY.  I enlarged and printed out the first name initials for my husband and I using Arial font.  I thought a natural dyed fabric would look the most like the wood tiles, so I went looking for burlap.  It was way too rough, so I switched to more of a linen fiber fabric.  I bought a sheet of black felt and a tube of black puffy paint (remember that stuff?) If you are a child of the 80s, like me, then you are familiar!

I used the cut-out letters as templates to cut out the black felt.  I used actual scrabble tiles as a reference and then carefully drew on the point values with puffy paint.  I love that the numbers by both of our initials are equal...because marriage should be equal ;)

After the paint was completely dry,  I sewed and stuffed the pillows.  I didn't want the letters to get distorted so I was careful not to over stuff the pillows.  My finished pillows are about 12x12.

Those sweet cane back chairs belonged to my late grandparents, but the orange crushed velvet (while pristine) just isn't doing it for me anymore.  They are my next project...

Vintage silhouettes

  On Friday, I finished the gallery wall in the boys' shared bedroom.  I made silhouette art using sheets of black vinyl adhesive, intended for wall decals.  There is a lot of software on the market for doing this, but I don't own a cricut, so I did mine the low-tech way.  I took digital side profile pics, printed them out, carefully cut them out and then used them as templates to trace onto the backside of the vinyl ahesive sheet.  I adhered mine to plain white cardstock, but these would look adorable on scrapbooking paper too.  Taking the photos was by far the hardest part of the project.  Having my five and three year old stand still was hard enough, but getting them to "look natural" was next to impossible.  When they weren't looking the wrong way, they were sucking in their lips, giggling, and making kissy faces.   Ohlin, especially, could not keep it together.

Oh well, I was just impressed he took off his pirate hat (for the first time in about 14 months!)  This is how it turned out:

This is the other silhouette I did, of his brother, Emery.  His features are more defined, because he stood still at a better angle.

One of the coolest objects I found for the wall was this vintage board game.  I couldn't find a date, but my guess is that it is from the late 1950s.  The game pieces were even unpunched, which is kind of like geek gold.

Here is the inside of the cover:

The board and unpunched pieces (the four colored disks around the ringed planet).

We searched Google, Ebay, and Board Game Geek, but couldn't find any information on this game.  If you have any clues to when this was published, please let me know!  I also bought this Casper the Friendly Ghost game at the same flea market.  It was published in 1959 and I love the artwork!  Both games cost us about $4, score!

I put Space Race into a shadow box and hung it on the middle of the wall.  If I can figure out a way to hang up the Casper board without damaging it, he'll find a home on my walls too.

All the other artwork was (almost) free!  The printables can be found here;

Rise and Shine,  You bring color to my life, and the ABC print.  The three 5x7 animal illustrations (including the frogs) are from a treasury of children's poems that I got for 25 cents from a school rummage sale.  There just happened to be some Charley Harper illustrations in the book.  Best quarter I ever spent!

 

The walls are now painted Teal Zeal (Behr) and there is a chalkboard paint racing stripe that goes around the entire room.  Only a couple more projects, and then I'll reveal the entire room...