art for the kiddo's room

In college, one of my professors taught us about decorating in one of our classes and how it relates to fashion. Shirts/pants are the basics of the room, paint, sets tone of the entire space, etc. Jewelry was the artwork and the pizazz.

Gag.

But seriously about the artwork thing...if there's one thing I am not fabulous at, it's artwork and/or jewelry respective to their elements.

So artwork for baby has been sort of stressful. Hours have been spent on Etsy.com and perusing Spearmint Baby in hopes of being inspired.

It was hard, but I've done it. I've successfully decided on what goes up in this new room. Nothing too childish, nothing too adult. Enough education, enough color. All without having a hippo with a letter "H" plastered all over it in primary reds and blues.

First, I bought this alphabet poster from Etsy seller, Bibitty:

A designer/blogger that I follow (via the web) had a child a little over a year ago and put this poster in her daughter's new bedroom as well and I'd always loved it. I hadn't settled on anything else and still thought it was adorable so purchased it got. We framed it in an IKEA Ribba white frame and since the art itself is 16" x 20", it's sort of the "big piece" in the room and on our big art wall.

I then found a seller on Etsy who sold wooden cut out letters. We're not talking Hobby Lobby curly-Q letters here, we're talking modern typefaces in 1/2" thicknesses, stained, not painted or hodge podged or whatever else people are doing these days. I was in love. But I didn't want to pay $35.00 for something Paul and I could easily do ourselves. I opened my AutoCAD at work and sketched out the exact typeface for the letter "A" I wanted and printed it to scale. We purchased a 1/2" sheet of birch and I traced the letter onto the board from the stencil I made in AutoCAD and Paul went to work. After we got the letter cut out using the jig saw, we sanded it down with our power sander, applied a wood conditioner to it and then a coat of stain. And for $15.00 I got myself my letter A and I only had to wait for Paul to get motivated to cut it out, not shipping. Just kidding.

Paul slaving away over my "lets be cheap" antics and the finished product.

To finish off the wall above the dresser where the French alphabet poster and letter A are to go I decided to go with something more local. Although, you really don't get any more local than your own front porch and a jig saw, but by local, I mean Oklahoma City.

There is an Etsy seller, DeweyandWest, that is based out of Oklahoma City. I'd fallen on their Etsy site almost a year ago by mistake, liked their work and favorited their shop but never did anything else with it. A few months ago, we hit up the Plaza Arts Festival with some friends and as we were walking around, Paul mentioned briefly to me that he liked the art work sitting on the very end of one of the tables. I turned to look at it, and sure enough it was a Dewey and West print. When they're shop popped up on my Etsy a few days ago, I knew their work would be the perfect thing to tie the room together. So after a few conversations back and forth we got a custom listing set up and I got these beauties:

They sold me just the linen print, they didn't apply it to the wood block frame.

We're going to frame them in the same white IKEA Ribba frames (but square) to match the frame for the alphabet poster. Fabulous.

Oh and I went ahead and did this too. My frame isn't as sculpted as hers but when I found a frame at the RINK for $4.00, I couldn't pass it up. Ours is painted coral pink from a tester I got at Home Depot and then I covered in a coat of clear gloss spray paint.

Just for future reference, if you need chicken wire, it doesn't exist anymore. It's now called "Poultry Fencing". I want to know who felt it was necessary to change the name to keep the rest of the foul being corraled from getting upset and wanting to sue. I mean, those turkeys, they want to make sure they aren't grouped in the same category with chickens, I guess. There must be some serious political unrest going on with those birds.

Hopefully there will be more to come soon. Since things are starting to get crazy around here just getting the projects done is my number one priority. Blogging about them? Not so much, but I'll try.