Sunday, June 19, 2011

Crafternoons 1: Pinwheel and Silhouette wall art


When C & I moved into our flat, it was pretty bare. It was furnished, but didn't have much for decor, other than a hideous print of an old farmhouse, which I have since upcycled (more to come on this later!). 
Growing up doing crafts of all kinds, and having a ridiculously talented artsy-crafty sister with an eye for interior design, I have a love for most anything homemade and crafty.

So, while considering ways to put our own stamp on the new flat, I came across a few DIY projects on various blogs. Granted, some of these blogs are wedding/event related but they are chock full of great projects. I figure, why do you have to wait until some special occasion to get crafty. Most of the projects would work just as well adding special homemade touches around the house - which is just what I did.


PINWHEELS
[Need: paper, glue gun]
I've got a mad stash of scrapbooking paper: all different sizes, colours, patterns and textures. Anything you have on hand though really would work well for these. I made the pinwheels into various sizes using this tutorial over at Style Me Pretty: How to make paper pinwheels
The tutorial says to use glue dots and leave them to flatten out, but I found using a glue gun worked really well and you can flatten and glue them on the back and they are ready to go! I then just used blue tac to stick them to the wall, which makes for easy removal or rearranging.

On the front I used buttons and also on some I cut little circles out of coordinating paper. You can see I made the biggest one out of a few different pieces of paper, you can make them as big or as small as you want, and they look great displayed in various sizes and colours on the wall. The possibilities are endless here. 





SILHOUETTES on canvas
[Need: paint, canvas, printer]
The pinwheels sat on the wall for quite a while on their own, and looked very sweet. But for C's birthday I came across another craft that I really wanted to do and that looked simple enough. I found this on Pearls & Cotton blog: Silhouette art portrait 


I really liked the blue and white colours, so I stuck with that. In the tutorial she uses big square canvases but I opted for oval because I liked how they looked like those old fashioned brooches. The tutorial on her site is a bit more involved (with shining a flashlight and tracing the image onto the canvas that way) whereas I simply took profile pictures with my camera, put them on the computer and then printed them 'whole page' sized, so they came out already the size I wanted them to be on the canvas and it was just a matter of cutting them out and tracing around them onto the canvas before painting. It took quite a few coats of the white and the blue (maybe 5 each), but I think they turned out really well!


I hope this gives people some inspiration for easy and fun ways to put a personal touch on what to display on your walls at home!



1 comment:

  1. Your silhouettes turned out really great! I love how you used oval canvases and not squares. They really do look like old brooches you would find at an antique store.

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