Art Wall

I recently got to have my Mom, Dad and little brother (who is not so little anymore, watch out, Grandma!) here for a whole week.  Mom and I are both incapable of sitting still, so we got a lot of projects accomplished, and a few more started so I can finish them later.  The first one was my raised garden beds.  I'll post about those later.  Today we will take a peek into my hallway...

This project has been on my list for months.  The hallway leading to the kids' rooms has become parking for their cars, and the wall above was collecting random artwork via staples and push-pins.  I envisioned a hodgepodge collection of cool frames in different sizes and colors.  I don't have a "before" picture, but trust me, it was a mess.  We do A LOT of projects around here.  The Mouse and Monkey ask to paint, draw, color, or "do school projects" almost every day, so the paperwork piles up quickly.  Our playroom has this setup, so I wanted to do something different for the hallway.

I thought I would shop around goodwill, or garage sales to find the frames, but we ended up using some I already had lying around, cutting a few ourselves, and buying the rest from Michael's with 40% coupons.

The white, green, purple, yellow and blue frames were from Michael's.  We cut the red circle and Orange diamond-ish one ourselves.  Black was a small wooden frame I found in a drawer.  The fish picture is a watercolor I did in the 4th grade.  I've been in cahoots with my mother-in-law to get one of Baldy's elementary school art pieces to add to this wall later, too.

I wanted to make it easy to add and remove art, so I hot-glued clothespins onto each frame.  Luckily I had some leftover from a Christmas project.  Large, white clothespins were surprisingly difficult to locate in December, so I used the backside of some of the decorated ones.  Bonus!  I can also balance art on top of them.

 

This canvas has been hanging on the wall for over a year, with only the kids' hand and footprints on it.  I had intentions of hand-lettering a cute quote about kids, but it never happened.  My Cricut Mini cut out some great vinyl letters easily enough, and I didn't have to make a decision about which quote to use!

All in all it was a pretty inexpensive project and it turned out even better than I thought it would!

-Lisa