Cheap and Easy...

We’re talking about artwork here people!!! ;)

For quite some time, only two things hung on the walls of our master bedroom…my favorite mirror and the jewelry organizer I made from an old paper towel holder and a frame.  I knew I needed to get a couple more things on the walls, but I didn’t have a huge budget to do so.  Thankfully, I was able to get creative and use a lot of things I already had on hand to fill our walls up a bit.

For my first piece, I headed to our basement and found some old stain and a piece of wood I purchased at Michael’s months ago.  Once the stain was dry, I got out my Crayola paint brushes and some white craft paint.  I wanted to stencil a line from our wedding song onto the wood for a simple, but meaningful project...but then I decided to get all craaaazy and just use my own handwriting.  It would add even more of a personal touch, and it’d force me to forget my perfectionist, OCD ways go out of my comfort zone.

I practiced the words a couple times on a piece of cardboard.

Then I threw caution to the wind and went for it.  The spacing isn’t perfect...and neither are the letters, but that’s okay.  I pretty much knew that was going to happen when I nixed the whole stencil thing.

For my second, third and forth pieces, I used some computer paper, craft paint, a foam brush and a couple stencils from a pack of Martha Stewart stencils {purchased from Michael’s the same day I bought the wood piece}.  I squeezed some white, gray, aqua and black paint onto my cardboard that I wrote on earlier...dipped my brush into a couple colors...and dabbed the colors onto the computer paper.  The patterns I used from Martha were smaller in scale than the piece of paper I was using {most were supposed to be used as borders on things}, so I just repeated the pattern over and over until the whole page was covered.  As the paint dried, the pages slightly rippled.  I expected this to happen since I was painting on, well, computer paper.  I was hoping it wouldn’t be a big deal and that they’d flatten out when I framed them in my 50% off Michael's frames.  Thankfully, they did. 

Here are my ummm, “masterpieces”. Ha!

And here is how everything looks hung in our room.  It might not be the most perfect or permanent art, but it works for now {and for our budget}.  

Anyone else get their Picasso on lately?