DIY: Hand Drawn Chalkboard Art

So a couple weeks ago the husband bought me a beautiful chalkboard. I swooned over it. Of course right away I went to buy some chalk, but our small town Walmart was sold out. For two weeks they’ve been sold out. Until the day before yesterday actually. You see when pretty much the only store you have is Walmart you go frequently & when they don’t have what you are looking for you keep checking back for it. Anyway I finally was able to get some chalk to start on some drawing.

I scoured the interwebs & Pinterest for ideas and how to tips. The most common idea was to create a grid. I found this tutorial and figured I’d give it a shot. It was handy that the image was there with the grid already on it & I didn’t have to print it out {since A.) I don’t have any ink in my printer right now and B.) I saved the image to my phone and just referenced it instead of a piece of paper. Yay! Saving trees!}

Here’s after my first session:

And here’s the finished project:

I’ll admit I’m not 100% thrilled with it. The chalk took a lot of getting used to. I think I’ll also be looking for chalk markers soon. But for now it was fun & I enjoyed it.

**Update: The day after I finished, before I had a chance to hang up the chalkboard, it got accidentally wiped against and part of the lettering on the lower half got smeared. I’ve already wiped it down again & will be starting my next design.**

DIY: Gallery Wall

Since we moved I’ve been telling my husband that I want a gallery wall. We debated back and forth over which wall we’d want all of our pictures on. When we finally decided and I had a free hour I started on the project.

What you’ll need:

Scissors
Frames, pictures, quotes, canvases, etc…
Marker or pen
Large paper (I used leftover paper table cloth from our wedding, this stuff has lasted us two years since our wedding. It won’t hurt to use a little for this project. But you can use whatever you have one hand, newspaper, printer paper, etc. It only needs to be as large as your biggest frame & you can even piece together a couple pieces of paper if need be.)

Not pictured:
Tape (masking tape or painters tape is best)
Nails
Hammer

1. Lay out your paper on a falt surface. (I spread out on the floor so I would have enough room). Arrange you frames on the paper in a way that they will fit best and use the least amount of paper (if your concerned about that). Trace around your frames & canvases. It doesn’t need to be exact. Make a note on each shape as to what photo it is & put an arrow so you know was orientation the paper needs to be.

2. Cut out all of your outlines. Like I said before it doesn’t need to be perfect. This is just to give you an idea of the arrangement on the wall.

3. Hang it up your templates. Get it all up on the wall. Rearrange it however many times you like. Change which wall you’d like it on, like us. This is when we realized that our arrangement didn’t fit how we’d like it on the wall we wanted. So we picked a different one and then a third one.

(So I totally took a picture of this, but there’s not a lot if light in our living room where we ended up hanging our frames & my husband was rushing me to just hang up the frames already. I had left the templates up for 2 days to make sure we would like it there.)

4. Hang up your frames. If you’d like leave the paper on the wall while you put your nails in, then just rip the paper off. (When I went to hang up our frames I found out that I had the direction for one of the big 16×20″ pictures wrong & that it wouldn’t fit where I had it anymore. So, we decided that three 16×20″ pictures might be a little much and took down two. Since I had already started putting nails in the wall there wasn’t much else we could do.)

5. Step back and enjoy your awesome gallery wall. I will totally get you a picture of our gallery wall, I just wanted to wait for the sun to be up so there’d be some decent lighting.

XOXO

DIY: 1-Hour $10 Wreath

So I must start off by apologizing that I forgot to take pictures if the first half of this project, but I think you’ll be able to follow along just fine.

Is it just me or are wreaths THE thing this fall? Everywhere I turn I see several with varying ways to do them & styles. Since we moved to the new house I’ve been going on and on to the DH about how I wanted to make a wreath for our door. Our front door is actually French doors, so I thought the door on the left would be perfect to put a wreath on and not have to worry about it banging against the door every time it was opened or closed.

We don’t have kids to be able to call this a naptime project, but it definitely is. I think it took me an hour total, including hanging on the front door.

So here we go. My $10 wreath tutorial.

What you’ll need:

1 large vine wreath (mine is 16 inches)

Some fake flowers (I used the wax kind that I had laying around)

An initial letter (50% off with a coupon from Michaels)

Twine/ribbon

Hot glue gun & glue

Wire cutters

Scissors

Wreath hook/hanger

What to do:

1. Take your flowers and start sticking them in your wreath. Cut the wire stem to 1-2″ once it is through the wreath and fold that over to hold it in place. This isn’t complicated & there is no perfect way to arrange them.

2. Once you have your flowers on, plug in your hot glue gun. Now is the time to grab that initial letter and figure out how you’d like it placed. I put mine on the opposite side of my flowers with a little tilt to it.

3. Hot glue the initial letter in place. Hot glue the stems that you folded over in place, just by running a line of glue accross them should do. I also added a little glue to the ends of all the stems so there’s nothing sharp or pointy to scratch my door.

4. Tie the twine or ribbon around your letter. I took two strings of twine and tied them in a regular double knot, but you definitely could get fancy and do a big bow with some ribbon or some fancy boy scout knots with twine. Whatever suits your fancy.

5. Place the wreath hanger over the top of the door and set your awesome new wreath creation on the hook. Stand back and enjoy.