Over the weekend we finally got around to hanging some things on the nursery walls… including the alphabet art I showed you sitting against the wall last week…

All of the deets about making the art can be found in last week’s post, which is here. But it’s now safely hung!

Much better, eh?

Since we were on a roll with hanging, we also decided to hang this metal E that I picked up at Anthropologie way back in February…

I love this thing and it’s one of my favorite things in his room. It took us a long time to decide where to hang it. In the gallery wall? Over the crib? In the end, the skinny wall next to the closet won.

Please ignore the disarray in the closet tower since I was doing laundry and digging through bins that day. Whoops.

Now it seems like all we have left to do in here is get a gallery wall going, which I honestly haven’t put much thought into. We were able to hang the alphabet art and the E because we brought Easton upstairs with us for one of his naps. He camped out in his crib 🙂

No we’re not mean, he literally spit that pacifier out on to his chest. Anyway, now that it took me 4 weeks to realize that I can put him in his crib while I work in his room, maybe I’ll try it again to plan out his gallery wall. I’ll add that to this week’s list of goals 🙂

Before Easton was born, I posted about my plans to make some sort of an alphabet print for his room. My original inspiration image hailed from Pinterest…

(from Free Home Decorating Ideas via Pinterest)

My previous post covers how I went from planning this out using paint and canvas, to printing on canvas, to finally just making it a print using Photoshop.

I’ve said this before, but I am no Photoshop expert. In fact, I have no clue of what I’m doing 99% of the time. When I posted about deciding to make the art using Photoshop, I figured Mike would make it because I was lacking the skils. Well, throw in a late baby, a husband who is busy with his own work and me spending hours in bed and guess what? I did it all by myself 🙂

I camped out in bed the last days before Easton came and one of the things I did was whip up a little art on my laptop. I started as just playing around to give Mike an idea of what I wanted, so that he could then do it better. As I played around, I realized I could do it on my own if I just kept tweaking it. It ended up being far easier than I thought!

I started with a rough draft… all I did was type some letters in Photoshop and change the font, color, size and location of each individual letter until I liked the way it looked. I was surprised at how easy this part was since each letter was it’s own layer and I could go back and tweak whichever letter I didn’t like.

My first attempt looked like this…

I liked it for the most part, but there was a lot of dead space. I had to figure out how the letters would look in the frame and make sure there wasn’t too much white space at the top and the bottom of the letters. We had picked up a large Virserum frame from Ikea before even starting this project, so that we were sure that we could size the print properly to fit the inexpensive frame. You may remember seeing the frame hanging around in some pictures…

The frame is 30 ¾” x 41 ½” and the mat opening is about 27 ½” x 19 ½”. I mentioned in my previous post that I saw on Shutterfly that I could order a print as large as 30″ x 20″, which was perfect. I would just have to make sure that my text was centered around the  27 ½” x 19 ½” size of the opening and that I made the image large enough pixel wise to print clearly.

So I set my Photoshop canvas to the size of the print (30″ x 20″) and began to tweak my first draft. A little bit of making fonts bigger, a little bit of overlapping letters and just playing around, then my final product looked like this…

I ordered it and it cost me a whopping $15 to print through Shutterfly. It was supposed to take over a week to come, but it ended up arriving in a few days and coming the day before Easton was born. If you remember from my birth story, I was already in labor at this point so Mike ran it upstairs to show me how great it printed. He put it in the frame just so I could see how it looked, but I didn’t snap a picture of it.

The large canvas size I chose worked because the letters were not at all blurry.

We planned to put it on the wall in between the giraffe sconces.

Since the sconces are white, the dresser is white, the frame is white and the mat is white, I thought it was too much white. It would look nice and clean, but I was just looking for a little more fun and contrast on this wall. So I decided to spray paint the mat navy blue.

I picked up this can of paint while I was in labor. I figured walking around Lowe’s would help, though I was in such pain that I could hardly walk and I had to stop and sit on a pile of wood. Whoops.

Finally this week, I decided to take the hour I had in between feeding, burping and cuddling to run outside and spray the mat. Hello backyard, I haven’t seen you in a while.

I just laid the mat on the grass because Mike was due to cut it anyway. The blue will be gone with one pass of the John Deere 🙂

It took several coats to make sure there were no white spots. My hand started cramping since the Valspar trigger was really hard to push down, so Mike took over.

Once we were done, the grass looked like this (which was actually really cool looking)…

But the mat looked like this!

Fast forward a few days after it completely dried and I had another baby nap to put the mat in the actual frame. Sidenote: Mike’s been spending most of his spare time working on the built-ins in the new office that we abandoned to work on the nursery. So I’m usually on baby duty and can’t work on projects, but I can’t complain because the built-ins are looking awesome 🙂

First I wanted to make sure the blues looked good together. The lid of the spray paint can looked more bluish than navy, but it was the most navy one I could find. Thankfully, it dried much darker!

I put it in the frame and I was surprised that he “glass” in the frame is plastic. No wonder why Ikea can sell such a large frame, with a mat for just $29.99!

We couldn’t find the hardware that came with the frame, so I just leaned it up against the wall to see how it would look.

And I love it. I’m shocked at how well the colors match the color scheme of the room. I really just tried to incorporate the blues of the bedding/curtains/ceiling, the greens of the bedding/closet/bookcase and the gray of the walls. This artwork was meant to be the glue that brought everything together, and I think it does.

The plastic “glass” of the frame made for some awful glare, so it was hard to capture pictures. I may actually just remove it when we mount the frame, at least to take better pictures for you guys 🙂

Though the glare does allow you to see the other elements in the room with the art, like how you can see the chevron curtains hanging out in this picture…

One more picture from the other side of the room!

Not to shabby for $15 for a DIY print + $29.99 for a large frame and mat. Oh and a couple of bucks for spray paint!

Since this post took me 3 sessions to write, Mike is actually at Lowe’s at the moment picking up some stuff for the office and some hardware to hang this bad boy. Hopefully this weekend we can both have time, at the same time, to hang it since it’s a two person job. Then we’re one step closer to actually being ready to give you a full nursery reveal and tour. I’m so excited 🙂

Update! Since I just completed this and I didn’t have time to tackle a new project, I decided to use this as project as my summer Pinterest Challenge entry, hosted by Young House Love, Bower Power, Centsational Girl and Ten June, all of which are some of my favorite blogs. 3 out of 4 of my Pinterest Challenge projects have been some form of wall art, guess you can tell what I like to do for fun…

Oh and we did get around to hanging this print on the wall, which I posted about here.

Tada! 🙂

Confession: I love lettering, typography, whatever you want to call it. I’ve known forever that I wanted to make some sort of alphabet art for the baby’s room, but I put off actually making something until I had a better idea of the space. Now that we have the elusive glider and ordered a bookcase, I know that we can add a mix of pieces to the wall over the bookcase (which has not yet arrived…)

Which means I can finally decide what to do with the space on the other side of the room, above the dresser. Mike talked about our adding some framed art here, but now that we know we can add a TON of frames to the space above the bookcase, I’m leaning towards one giant artpiece.

Of course I don’t have a head-on picture of the dresser, on the wall it’s staying on, that includes the height of the ceiling. But you get the idea that the wall above the dresser is a giant blank slate.

We’ve waited to install our giraffe sconces until we were sure of where we were putting the dresser. Which meant we had to have the glider. Which we just got last week. See how everything comes back to that damn glider?

Now we know we can install our giraffe sconces over the dresser like our inspiration picture…

(Honey & Fitz via Centsational Girl)

Then in the middle, I want to add some giant, horizontal alphabet art. Like this…

(from Free Home Decorating Ideas via Pinterest)

Or like this…

(via Project Nursery)

I’m partial to styles that have multiple fonts, sizes and are not perfectly aligned. Like this one…

(via Project Nursery)

Or this…

(via Etsy)

Or even patterned like this one…

(via Area Fare)

You notice how all of those last 3 have blue in them and 2 out 3 also have green? That’s for all of you people who have tried to tell us that you know we’re having a boy because of our nursery paint choices. Muhahaha.

Up until last night, I figured I’d draft something using a couple of different fonts, then paint the final product on canvas. As I fiddled with Photoshop last night trying to do that fancy mock up of our new bookcase that I posted above, I realized that we can just design something in Photoshop and have it printed on canvas. This would save me a TON of time and be a lot more fool proof than my free handing. I looked up the prices of printing on canvas using Kodak Gallery and was shocked to see that it would be about $150 for a 24″ x 36″, which is about what we would want.

So I went back to doing it myself, when Mike reminded me that the last time I went to Michael’s to buy a canvas that large, they were super expensive too (even with 50% off sale). I do know how to stretch my own canvas, which is always an option, but then I would still be freehanding the letters. Humpf.

Then I thought of just doing a print in a matted frame. I decided to see how large of a print we could order and I was shocked to see that they come as large as 20″ x 30″ for just $20! I checked the Ikea website to see how large their frames go and it seems as though they sell them pretty large. We’d probably want the finished product, meaning the outside of the frame, to be around 24″ x 36″. Ikea notoriously has awkward sized frames, so I think we’ll pick up a frame first. Then we can see how large the opening is and plan a print to fit the opening. The whole thing– print, mat and frame should run us about $50 and would be less tedious than painting by hand. Though I need Mike to be in charge of the Photoshopping magic, I am still a rookie and what takes me 2 hours takes him 2 minutes.

We’ll keep you posted on our progress (though not the specific colors we’re using just yet!). Hopefully the logistics work out and between the 2 of us, we can whip up something awesome 🙂

ps- My last day of work is Monday. Let’s hope the baby gives me a full week to wrap up all of this nursery business!