When we first moved into our home in 2009, I painted (or, more precisely, had my parents paint, because I was 36 weeks pregnant) an accent wall in my living room: dark blue against the three khaki walls, a moderately-striking background to our giant wood entertainment center.
A year or two later, we rearranged the living room furniture, putting a cream-colored couch against the blue wall in place of the entertainment center. Needless to say, the couch didn't take up nearly as much wall space as the cabinet had, so suddenly I was faced with a big, blank, blue wall. I browsed Pinterest and schemed and planned and even went so far as to send my husband to Home Depot for materials.
Four-ish years later, the materials still sat in the basement, the wall still blank.
Until yesterday.
My mother-in-law had a great picture of the boys turned into a picture canvas for us for Christmas, and the logical place for it was above the cream couch. It was lost in the sea of dark blue, however, and I decide it was time to complete this project once and for all! (That isn't really true, because I envision it was a fluid project, open to change over the years. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)
The project: picture tiles. There are a dozen different tutorials in the world wide web, but I used this one (more or less). The process is relatively simple: size a picture to the size of the tile (4x4 in my case), print on regular paper, mod podge to the tile, then mod podge over it to seal. The brush strokes on top of the picture are visible, so you want to have some artistic reason to it; I did mine in sort of a cross-hatch to mimic the lines of the canvas picture. Also, it's very important to get rid of air bubbles under the picture; important, and nearly impossible. No matter how careful I was in the first place, no matter how long I let it dry, when I put the top coat of mod podge on, I got more bubbles. I was able to smooth most of them out with minimal fingerprints, and in the end decided most people wouldn't be looking that closely to worry any further.
I used picture-hanging command strips to attach them to the wall, but any sort of wall-hanging thing that can be attached to the tile would work, I imagine.
For now, I have six tiles on each side of the canvas. Tiles are super cheap, though (less than 20 cents each), so I figure I can always print new pictures and replace tiles as the kids grow up. Probably, even the canvas in the middle will change eventually. (There are always deals for that sort of thing.) In my mind, though, the four baby pictures (two on each side of the canvas) will always stay. :) (Because I know someone will comment on this: yes, if there are more babies, I will have to rethink. I'm not planning that far ahead at this point.)
Without further ado, realizing that it's really impossible to get good pictures of something this large:
A year or two later, we rearranged the living room furniture, putting a cream-colored couch against the blue wall in place of the entertainment center. Needless to say, the couch didn't take up nearly as much wall space as the cabinet had, so suddenly I was faced with a big, blank, blue wall. I browsed Pinterest and schemed and planned and even went so far as to send my husband to Home Depot for materials.
Four-ish years later, the materials still sat in the basement, the wall still blank.
Until yesterday.
My mother-in-law had a great picture of the boys turned into a picture canvas for us for Christmas, and the logical place for it was above the cream couch. It was lost in the sea of dark blue, however, and I decide it was time to complete this project once and for all! (That isn't really true, because I envision it was a fluid project, open to change over the years. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)
The project: picture tiles. There are a dozen different tutorials in the world wide web, but I used this one (more or less). The process is relatively simple: size a picture to the size of the tile (4x4 in my case), print on regular paper, mod podge to the tile, then mod podge over it to seal. The brush strokes on top of the picture are visible, so you want to have some artistic reason to it; I did mine in sort of a cross-hatch to mimic the lines of the canvas picture. Also, it's very important to get rid of air bubbles under the picture; important, and nearly impossible. No matter how careful I was in the first place, no matter how long I let it dry, when I put the top coat of mod podge on, I got more bubbles. I was able to smooth most of them out with minimal fingerprints, and in the end decided most people wouldn't be looking that closely to worry any further.
I used picture-hanging command strips to attach them to the wall, but any sort of wall-hanging thing that can be attached to the tile would work, I imagine.
For now, I have six tiles on each side of the canvas. Tiles are super cheap, though (less than 20 cents each), so I figure I can always print new pictures and replace tiles as the kids grow up. Probably, even the canvas in the middle will change eventually. (There are always deals for that sort of thing.) In my mind, though, the four baby pictures (two on each side of the canvas) will always stay. :) (Because I know someone will comment on this: yes, if there are more babies, I will have to rethink. I'm not planning that far ahead at this point.)
Without further ado, realizing that it's really impossible to get good pictures of something this large:
The whole display.
Left side. Baby pictures are Levi (top) and Silas (bottom).
Right side. Baby pictures are Owen (top) and Toby (bottom).
It turned out fabulously (if a bit on the homemade side), and I love it! Hooray for the end of the big blank blue wall!
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