Bought

Have you heard of the website 20X200? They are an online store that sells great inexpensive art...what's not to love?

Today I bought this watercolour reproduction of a Toronto map (the same artist has also done London, NY, Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities)...I love it because I can pinpoint where our house and neighborhood are, the ravine I run in, the inner harbour where my husband and I used to sail.....but at the same time it's a watercolour, so it has gentle hues and a fluid feel.

I think it will look great in a simple white Ikea Ribba frame in our upstairs hall.

How much bacon, you ask? The print was $50 for an 11X14 archival pigment print ($85 including shipping). 

Green

I am slowing adding hits of intensely saturated apple green to our bedroom. It is a colour that makes me happy, and it also happens to be the 'theme' colour from our wedding, now 5 years ago.

Last night I scooped up the green urn for $7.07 at my local Goodwill. It has a beautiful 'crackled' surface up close, and I love the way it brings out the green in the painting. .....which was another good deal!!! I gave it to my husband last year (our 4th anniversary), with the trees in the painting referencing the trees in Khalil Gibran's poem 'The Prophet', which was read at our wedding (a stretch, maybe, but I really liked the painting!).

I picked up the painting for a song at my local framing store. Someone had dropped it off for framing 7 years earlier and never picked it up!

Kid's art display

I have long been trying to figure out a fun way to display some of my daugher's art.

Today we took two cool knobs that I bought at a Zara Home store (in Barcelona - it was amazzzzzzing), afixed them to the wall (with special plugs for screws) with a satin ribbon in between, and hung some art using colourful clothes pins from Dollarama.

Colourful, cheap, personal, and easy. I love it!!

Spring snowballs

I recently rearranged the furniture in our living room

.....which meant that the placement of artwork had to change

...and while we were moving the art work, I decided that what was 3 photos should become a gallery wall of 6 images

.....and then I decided to swap the living room and dining room carpets.

Insane? Yes....this is my brain on maternity leave. The good news is that my husband exercises monumental patience and did a perfect job hanging the photos. They are all from a trip we took to Tofino, BC a number of years ago; I love art work that reminds me of something special and sentimental.

Do you have projects like this that snowball?

Gallery wall notes:

As per usual, I used Ikea's Ribba frames. They fit the bill from a price perspective, but they do have a few drawbacks. The hanging mechanisms for the larger sizes are difficult to match across multiple frames. As well, because Ikea frames aren't the pinacle of quality, they are often not identically sized and have some bowing to them. This makes a gallery wall very difficult to make look absolutely semetrical.

I had the prints done at Costco. I was able to upload the images online and the prints were ready a mere hours later. The prints were about $3 each....a steal!

Gallery wall update

I posted a few weeks ago (here) about a vision I had for a gallery wall in the back corner of our bedroom.

Well this weekend we finally got the first set of pictures/art up on the wall, and I am pleased by the way it turned out! All of the credit goes to my husband who is a master at hanging pictures. ...such an asset to have around the house!

To play it safe, I used all of the same type of frames (Ikea Ribba) and kept the distance between each frame at 1.5 inches.

Goodnight Moon, Goodnight room!

This weekend we finally got around to putting the final pictures up in my 2.5 year old daugther's room. I have blogged previously (here) about my love of graphic posters and how I go about framing them. The posters for my daugther's room came from the Vancouver 2010 Olympics - they are sentimental because we brought her to the Olympics when she was only 8 months old.

The room is not perfect:

...the wall colour is not quite what I wanted

...the pictures are too high thanks to the preexisting chair rail,

...I really don't love the mirrored doors I chose for the closets that we built

...and I'm sure a designer would have a seizure when they saw the amount of colour I've packed into this room

...but it was a labour of love and we did all the work ourselves. Most importantly, my daughter loves her room and sleeps soundly and peacefully. ....what more can you ask for!?

Here are a few before pictures!

Wall candy

I am always lusting over expensive art. But I am starting to think that sometimes it's not necessarily about the art you have, but how it's displayed.

After my parents renovated their home, my mom found an 'art consultant' to help her hang art around the house. This sounds pricey, I know, but it really wasn't. ...this 'art consultant' is actually the guy that did all the wire shelving in her closets, and art consultation is how he moonlights. It's really just his passion.

He visits your house and looks at all your art together (ie, not hung). He then goes away for a week, soaks in the art and the open walls in your home, and comes back with his recommendations. Once you agree on placement, he arrives with all the right tricks and tools to expertly get the art up on your walls. Anyone who has hung art with their partner will agree that this service would be a major marriage saver!

As a tangent, I once heard Lynda Reeves say on HGTV that art should be hung 54 inches from the floor to the center of the images. There are of course always exceptions, but this is a good rule of thumb that I have used.

Happy hanging!

A Jackson Pollock for Grandma and Grandpa

I have been away from the blog for a few days now, and it feels like forever! My husband has been away for work (in Vegas...don't have pitty!!) and yesterday I travelled out to Vancouver alone with my two kids to visit with my parents. Trying to pack two kids for a five hour flight that left at 8am without my partner in crime around was no small feat! I am running on minimal sleep, needless to say.

In advance of our trip to Vancouver, my daughter made a piece of art for each of Grandma and Grandpa. I started with a wooden block 'canvas', which I purchased for under $5 each at Deserres. The beauty of these is that because they are made of wood, they stand on their own and do not need to be framed or hung on the wall, but are more formal and permanent than a drawing on a tattered piece of paper. They are perfect for a ledge, shelf, or table vignette.

I started by applying gesso (an artist's primer; this is not necessary. You could instead just use white paint, or you could just paint/colour directly on the wood. I just wanted a white background) to each block. Once it was dry, my plan was to have my daughter paint each block with coloured acrylic paints....but I just couldn't muster the energy for the prep and clean up. So instead, I just handed my daughter crayons with which to create her masterpiece.

I don't think she is ready for a gallery showing yet, but nonetheless Grandma and Grandpa were very touched to have special pieces of 'art'.

TTC love

I have always had a soft spot for the TTC, despite them trying to expropriate my house (unbelievable but true; see here). So when I saw this piece of art in Crema coffee shop on the Danforth today, I just swwwwwoooned. I want it for my living room. It is tough to tell from this photo, but the finish is super glossy. I believe that it is a list of the original street car lines.

I did some research and determined that the artist is Christine Flynn. Not only is she local, but she also has what looks like an amazing vintage shop on Queen East (just West of Danforth). A selection of her finds can be seen here; I am definitely going to have to check it out soon....maybe I'll take the Queen streetcar!

Poster framing...update

Yesterday, I blogged here about framing a poster that my husband and I bought in Quebec City a few years ago.

To get the poster mounted on foam core and a new mat cut, I headed to the framing store at Pape and Danforth (North East side). I must admit that I've had a bad experience here before. The last time I went, my item took 3 weeks because the owner said he didn't like to work hard any more, as he had worked hard his whole life and now he is focused on relaxing. I am someone who loves to support small business, but admittedly, this had me a little irritated. Nonetheless, I decided to give them another chance yesterday. This time the woman in the shop refused to order a white mat for me since it was a lot of work to order just one mat, and the only colours she had on hand to offer were yellow and green. I'm beginning to think these folks don't actually want to be in business.

So instead I headed to Frame Maker at Jones and Queen E. The gentleman that I worked with was extremely helpful and provided a very fair quote. Done and done. I will pick up my poster and new mat in a few days!

Gallery wall

My vision for the art work that I gave my husband for Valentine's Day (blogged about here) was that it would be one of the central pieces of a gallery wall in our bedroom. I have long admired gallery walls with a mish mash of art and photos that all somehow work together, but I've always been too timid to try.

Instead I have typically gone for simple and balanced repititon, as in these photos:

In the nursery



In the living room



In the nursery



In the office


But I figured that the wall along this cosy reading nook at the back end of our bedroom would be the perfect place to take the plunge with a gallery wall of family photos.

I have my first pieces all ready to hang....I think we're going to do it on Monday...Family day! I'll let you know how it goes...in the meantime let me know if you think my plan has any fatal flaws!

Poster panache

 

There is something about posters that bring me back to my university years. At the beginning of every year my roommates and I would go to the poster sale on campus, pick up a few new pieces for our apartment, and proudly put them up on our walls with tacks.

I feel like my taste has matured at least a little bit since then, but I still have a soft spot for posters. My husband and I bought a vintage CP Hotels poster in Quebec City while we were there for our 'babymoon' a few years ago, and we bought two really vivid posters from the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. I am sentimental about all of these posters as they remind me of special times in our lives.

I framed the Olympic posters a few months ago (they are going up this weekend in my daughter's room, finally!) and I am in the midst of framing the Quebec City one now.

For all of them, I am using Ikea Ribba frames, which are nice and cheap. My only warning with the Ribba frames is that they are often sloppily sized, so even if you measure impecibly, they can look a little asymetrical and unbalanced if you are doing a gallery wall. I hung 2 pictures in our office and couldn't figure out why they didn't look even....turns out the frames are a quarter of an inch different in height.

My biggest tip for framing posters is to go to your local frame store and get them to mount the poster on foam core. This is inexpensive, and ensures that the poster lies flat against the glass even if it's been rolled for years. You may also have to get custom mats cut if your poster is an odd size (which mine appears to be).

I will upload some photos once the posters are up on the wall! It makes me want to go buy a Breakfast Club movie poster for my dining room and put it up with tacks!

Easy nursery art

In advance of my son's birth in August, we moved my 2 year old daughter out of the nursery into a 'big girl room'. The nursery has some floating Ikea shelves in it that were filled with special mementos of my daughter, but have sadly remained virtually empty since my son moved in. ....it's the plight of the second child to not have as many keepsakes, I suppose!

Until I come up with some more special items to fill these shelves, I've come up with a temporary alternative. I collected a series of special books that we've received and put them up on the shelves. I like all the colour they add, and the way they can easily be switched around as the spirit moves me!

....and yes, I need to find a more visually pleasing clock. I love Tivoli's Model Three Clock Radio but am waiting patiently until one shows up on Craigslist.

In praise of pillows

I have always lusted over the exquisite pillows that Sarah Richardson uses in her designs. So when we built a window bench in my daughter's 'big girl' room, I decided to make some of my own. I am not an expert sewer by any means, but I do have a sewing machine (a very inexpensive Shark brand machine that my Mom bought be at Canadian Tire) and once and a while the spirit moves me to make stuff.

I headed to Designer Fabrics on Queen West to purchase some fabric, pom pom trim, piping, and ribbon. The extra sentimental part of these pillows is the vintage buttons that came from my Grandmother's sewing kit, as my daughter has Grandma's middle name as her first name.

Art for the bathroom

(Ignore my reflection in the centre of this photo)

We have recently redone our main floor bathroom (I will post on this in the future). I was in need of some art, but didn't have any cash to put towards it. So I made my own piece. I decided on a pattern of cicles to juxtapose the rectangular shape of the tiles. I think the reason it works so well in the space is because I used some of the extra wall paint (Benjamin Moore Grey Cashmere) as the base, and then just mixed it with some of my own acrylic paints for some contrast. The frame is from Ikea...I think the all in this cost less than $25! Start the car! Start the car!