Questionable Taste Becomes Art {Re-doing Artwork}

Hey everyone!

I know I teased this post yesterday, but I’ve only just gotten around to it. As many of you saw in previous posts, our massive bed made my DIY art from bedroom decor past look like doll house furniture.

See those sad little paintings? Way too small.

I made those the summer that we moved into our home, when our bed was just a double and flat on the floor. The scale made so much more sense then, but now, all has changed. Our bed is a King and has a HUGE headboard and footboard to boot. So those lovely pictures I worked so hard on, just a few years ago, were way too little now. So I was on the hunt for something new. I thought that the easy, most cost effective solution was to cover a larger something in fabric. That way, it’s cheaper and something I’ve made, so it matches all the greens and blues in the room perfectly.

Well, finding something to a larger scale that would be easy to hang was not as easy as I thought. I had intended to find something at Lowes, like a large piece of foam board that I could mount hangers onto to put onto the wall. No luck there (though I still love you Lowes). So I went back to my original idea that I could find some sort of frame (either a canvas stretcher or an old beat up frame) to cover with the fabric. Those forms would be easy to hang and easy to find. Well, I didn’t find either of those, but I did find a $10 gem at our local, fantastic tag sale.

Isn’t he just the most handsome thing? With his textured paint, glitter badly glued on, and even some foil for good measure. Hey, stop laughing…

Let’s have some honesty time now. This guy isn’t very much to look at. In fact, we laughed carrying it all the way to the car. So there’s a reason we saw it where we saw it. My mother and I found this in the “bargain barn” at the tag sale. The bargain barn is full of project pieces that need a little love. This guy was shoved behind several large pieces and didn’t seem to have a price tag in sight. Just as an informal sizing, my mother guessed it was probably five feet long and four feet high (she turned out to be almost spot on). I realized I was looking at my project solution. So we found the man who organizes the barn and asked him about the picture. He gave us a priceless, and unforgettable look, and told us he was desperate to sell it. I had already made my max $10, because it was huge and had a pretty sturdy frame. He happened to say $10, and instead of haggle like I should have, I said we would take it! We paid, grabbed it from the barn, and laughed our way to the car. And then we realized, it might not fit in the car! After a lot of maneuvering we finally got that sucker in the backseat.

He took up the entire back section of a small SUV. This guy is JUST the right size for our bedroom.

My mom made the awful joke that he already had some of our colors in his paint job, so maybe I shouldn’t recover him. He didn’t even make it an hour in the house before he was reconstructed into a new piece. I had to immediately drape the fabric I had bought previously, just to make sure I did in fact buy enough.

It fits! Now you’re mine, ugly framed art. You will be made new!

I immediately sent this picture to a few people as a “ha! success!” before actually completing the project. Notice the pooling on the bottom? Yup, not stapled yet. Boy was I way in over my head. Not only was it super difficult to cover, it was also super difficult to hang. Let me explain.

I covered the painting, frame and all, with the fabric and stapled it to the backing of the frame. I used the same technique that I had done with the seat covers, so that wasn’t the problem. Remember how big I said this sucker was? This was definitely a difficult, one-person job. Not only did I pick a difficult fabric (a type of jersey that stretches easily), the sheer size of the frame was enough to make it sweat-inducing. Sorry for that visual! I had to move from the vertical sides to the horizontal sides, making sure to check that the fabric was correctly aligned and not getting too stretched. Since it was a geometric, it was really important to keep it at a nice horizontal angle. I did have to take out a few staples and put a few new ones in, but overall it worked out well!

Love the color and the pattern. Perfect for an art piece. It kind of mimics a painting, right?

The next hurdle was to get this big guy up on the wall. And because I can’t wait for anything, I was left to try and do this on my own. I tried the first time without measuring. Silly Ashley, you always measure. It ended up resting on the top of the headboard and was definitely not a cute look. After measuring and getting on my tiptoes, I finally anchored the wall mounts in and precariously hung the picture on my own. I may or may not have fallen over a few times in the process, but it ended up on the wall, didn’t it?!

Perfect scale, don’t you think?

It also looks great with the new curtains I blogged about a few weeks ago.

 

See? Let’s admire the color coordination for a moment, shall we? The green is echoed in both the fabric of the artwork and the fabric of the curtains. It’s like they’re opposites with the blue being the background of the art piece and the green with the curtains. 

So, in review, this project was easy/hard. Easy to do because it just requires some fabric, a frame, and a staple gun. Hard to do because of the scale and effort involved. I spent about $15 for the fabric (two yards worth). The frame ended up being $10.60 after tax. So this project only cost about $25. It would have been about $30 without my coupon, but you know how I love my coupons! Anyways, this is really a simple project that doesn’t have to cost a lot but can make a BIG (literally) impact!
XOXO,

Ashley