Gallery A La' Krull

I love love love a good shadow box, but I'm really not too fond of super traditional ones. I saw pictures of an artist's exhibit of her personal memorabilia in shadow boxes, and just fell in love with their eclectic, modern, and nostalgic feel. I took some things from around our house, and created our own little gallery of memories.

1) I took a ton (well, 48 or so), of those flat clear marbles and modge podged faces of family members on the back. I used up a bunch of those reject photos, from the non-digital age mostly, that had at least one "good" face on it. Then I traced the small circle around it, cut it out, and modge podged. I then hot glued them into a square.

2) I used a cute picture of The Crazies, mounted it directly onto the glass of the frame from the inside, then mounted several pairs of the their sunglasses onto foam core as the background(a couple I supplemented with party favor glasses, still cute, but I had to at least leave them each with one useable pair!)

3) Goofball is in his impressionist phase of artistry, so he so graciously allowed me to frame this masterpiece. Next, I hot glued the actual water color paint box to the front of the mat that came with the frame. The paint was just about gone, so it would have been trash anyway.

4) Sweetpea, my own self-appointed princess, posed with a gaggle of her many necklaces. I used an exact-o knife to cut her out of the picture, mounted her directly to the glass on the inside of the frame, then filled up the shadow box with most of her necklace collection. Bonus, they are now not strewn about the house, but contained in one adorable piece of art.

5) These two photo-booth picture strips are from our blissful dating life. We actually used them on our wedding invitations too. I took the strips, headed to Kinkos, enlarged and color copied them. Next I cut them out carefully, spray-mounted them to black foam-core, and hung them from the inside of the shadow box at the top with small ball chain links and eye-hooks.

Maybe I'll add more boxes over the years, maybe not. But I just love how they turned out!

p.s. The frames were pretty affordable, because I got them from my favorite place to buy frames :) FYI

Easy ABC Art

I am so excited to be in the midst of making over Sweetpea's room. She just got her first big girl bed and it has inspired me to complete projects I have had on my "craft to-do" list for months (years?). The first is a quilt. I have purchased the most spectacularly adorable Amy Butler fabric, but have yet to actually start cutting. The second project is this super easy ABC Art for her wall. I was inspired by a similar project I saw in a scrapbook magazine a few years ago. The whole project cost me about $10.00 and I just love it, and more importantly, Sweetpea does too!

First, I gathered my supplies.
* a canvas, any size (I had this humongo one hanging around the house from a failed "fine art" attempt I made a few years ago, then spent some time in our family room covered in some cool fabric from Ikea, now on to it's new life as ABC Art...)

* Chipboard ABC's
* patterned paper of your choice

* pictures, trinkets, stickers, etc. for your ABC pictures

How To:

1) Paint the canvas (I used a bright pink acrylic)

2) Spray paint the chipboard letters (I used a turquoise blue, then distressed the edges with some sandpaper)

3) Cut 54 squares or rectangles in your choice of paper (a mix of stripes, polka dots, and flowers are my favorite combo)

4) Gather trinkets to pictorially represent each letter (some of my favorites are the owl sticker for "o", the picture of my girl for "m", an old key from my Grandma for "k", a zebra print ruffle for "z") If Sweetpea were older, I might have had her illustrate some of the items, kid art is so awesome and would really become a keepsake. This is the fun part!5) Arrange the letters and pictures and modge podge those suckers to the canvas

6) Done! A totally cool and unique to your family piece of kid room art!