Artwork – A Smith of All Trades

Furniture, Home Improvement, Interior Decorating

These are a few of my favorite things

February 6, 2015 Jessica Smith

I’ve been working on creating a gallery wall of some sort in my living room for months now. I am not one of those people who is naturally talented at gallery walls. In fact, I almost always hate them when I’m finished with them.

We’d hung a gallery wall in our bedroom that we left up for no time at all because B and I both ended up not liking the way it looked:

This one was just so blah and symmetrical…

Even though I’ve been a gallery wall failure, I always admire them. I decided to try again in our living room and boy was it a process.

This is the wall I started with:

OK, so that’s an awful photo. But basically it had one large canvas piece on it I got from Home Goods. I love the painting, but it doesn’t look nice above our mint couch, which is now on the wall in our living room. Plus, it didn’t fill the space on the wall enough.

Here’s the first iteration of a gallery wall I did:

A few things to note:

Look how far this room has come! Holy smokes, I still can’t believe it. (Better photos at the end of the post, I swear)
I was trying to decide if I wanted to abandon my mint curtains for white curtains, hence why they are the wrong way on the window. I got a lot of questions about that from guests 🙂

I bought all of those frames from Home Goods and really liked the mixture of wood, metals, rustic and glam. But I just never loved it. I think part of me is sick of seeing the same photos over and over again. We’ve been married for 3+ years and engaged for 5+ years, so the fancy engagement and wedding pictures are old news at this point. But they are still the most frame-worthy photos we have and they are always what I resort to.

To get this arrangement, I laid all of the frames out on the floor and put a lot of thought into which frame went where. This ended with a mostly symmetrical arrangement.

Here was my beef with this wall:

Too symmetrical
Too photo-centric
Old photos

Really, it just seemed like I was trying too hard. At least to me it did. I left it like this for months until I could figure out what I wanted to do differently. If you notice the horizontal photo that was displayed vertically — yes, this was left this way for months, too.

I started to think I wanted to redo some of the gallery wall after B’s birthday. I gave him an amazing print of our pup, Remmy. It’s basically the best gift I’ve ever given anyone.

We hung it immediately in place of one of our real photos, because how could we not?

It wasn’t until after Christmas that I had the idea to completely redo the gallery wall with art only. You see, B gave me two amazing maps of Maryland. The big kahuna was a map from 1880 — holy old! We had the map custom framed and needed a spot to hang it. B wanted to hang it over our console table, but I’ve got my heart set on finding the perfect mirror to reflect all of the natural light from our bay window. The map has mint and pink in the outlines of counties and cities, so I thought it would look marvelous over our couch.

I started messing around with the wall little by little, pulling down artwork from other spots in the house.

Finally, I just decided to go for it. All of the photos came down and the nails came out of the wall.

I started my placing everything on the floor, but again I made the design so symmetrical. So I hung up the map (my anchor piece) and two other pieces of art and left it alone. It looked like this for a week before I decided to do what I do best and just wing it.

At this point the wall was already riddled with nail holes that needed to be touched up, so I just went for it. Everything was added one by one. The spacing isn’t even, the whole wall isn’t symmetrical… and I LOVE IT. It just fills the large wall so nicely without feeling too huge.

You’ll see a lot of things I’ve shared before on the blog:

You’ll also see a bunch of other art I’ve collected over the years:

Golden Pond canvas print (Home Goods)
Shadow box full of roses B has given me
My two new Maryland maps
A graphic print of dogs my coworker gave me
Two bird paintings from one of my favorite artists

Basically, it is a wall of my favorite things: dogs, birds, Maryland and love 🙂 I seriously couldn’t be happier with how this turned out.

Funny enough, I’m sure it isn’t 100 percent complete. As you can see, I left room around the edges for small additions. I’d like to do a more colorful print, replacing the Do What You Love print. And I am always checking out Pratt Creek Art for more bird paintings.

Plus, I really need to patch the holes you can still see and hang everything (in the exact same spot) maybe a tad bit straighter ;p

On the whole, It really does so much for this room. I love my gray walls, but with nothing on them they can be quite dreary. This art wall adds much-needed color and pizzaz to my favorite room in the house — a room that really has come a long way.

It just goes to show you that rushing into designing a room doesn’t always end with the best result. We’ve been in our house for three years now and this room is now just starting to feel like it is almost finished. All it needs is a mirror, and I am one happy home owner!

Next week I’ll share the redo of our master bedroom. It’s not complete yet, but it looks a lot better than it did a month ago.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Life

Interior Decorating Class

June 23, 2014June 23, 2014 Jessica Smith

Last week I finished my interior decorating class that I took through Howard Community College. It was a 6-week class that met at a local high school during which we learned about basic design principles, color, accessorizing, floor plans, window treatments…. it was awesome.

The class was small — only 12 people — so we got to talk to our instructor a lot about projects we are working on and problems we are running into. I chose to focus on our living room during the class and actually made a lot of progress! For me, the most helpful classes were the floor plan session and the color session.

There’s always been something off about the way I had the furniture arranged upstairs, so the floor plan class allowed me to get feedback and ideas from my classmates. They suggested that I take two chairs and place them directly in front of the coffee table to create a designated seating/conversation area. I’d been wanting to buy two chairs, but I had planned to place them on the walls, versus in the middle of the room.

When I placed the chairs in front of the coffee table, it really did create a much more conversation-ready sitting area.

You can kind of see that here:

Those are the second set of chairs that I bought for the room. And guess what…

…those went back, too. I got them from Target for a great price, but since they are dining chairs they were just too small. Well, if I were to put them along the wall like I originally planned, they were perfect. But in this new configuration, they were too small and too obviously for a dining room.

Instead, I swapped them out for two charcoal slipper chairs from Target.

They have a great button detail that sort of mimics the faux tuft in our couch.

I definitely sacrificed quality for coast on this purchase, which is unfair since the chairs are actually quite comfortable and very nice now. But, I’m pretty sure they won’t last more than a few years, especially with a furniture-loving dog and future kiddos — at $128 a chair, that’s not the end of the world.

Now, my next challenges. End tables and color!

Another portion of our class was spent looking through catalogs to see if anything piqued our interest. It really helped us nail down our individual styles, too.

I love the Ballard catalog best — does the circled table look familiar? That’s my coffee table (well, two of them) that I got from the thrift store!

This page has the end table I’m pining over. They are $149 and I’d need two of them, so I’m basically waiting until I feel like dropping $300. I think I’m going to poke around at thrift stores for a few months before I make that decision. But if I don’t find anything else, I’ll eventually be purchasing these – I love how the iron will match the coffee tables without being too matchy-matchy. And the mirror will reflect lamplight and the light from our bay window! I just need to find them at a thrift store for $10/each now 🙂

Yes, I am cheap. Well, not cheap. Just frugal.

Now color — that is my real challenge. I love the gray and mint combo I’ve got going on, but I think the room is too dark and too monochromatic. So now I am working on adding more color to the space to create more visual interest in the space. I will be doing this through throw pillows and artwork. You can actually see some of the pillows I’m considering on my Pillows Pinterest board. I’ve been adding like crazy this weekend. Now I just need to make decisions. A lot of them are from Etsy, which means no returns. So it’s a little extra incentive to make sure I am positive before I purchase.

I’ll hopefully make a decision soon and move on with artwork. The walls are crying for something on the. I’m thinking a gallery of some sort behind the couch and a console table with a mirror above it on the other wall. We’ll see what happens!

#HoCoArts #HoCoSchools #HCPSS #HoCoCrafts #HoCoBlogs

Craft Projects

Greeting Card Art

June 17, 2012July 18, 2012 Jessica Smith

My aunt gives the best cards in the world. Seriously. They are fantastically beautiful and are one of the best parts of my birthday each year. I don’t know where she finds them, but boy do her cards have Hallmark beat.

I’ve saved several of the cards she’s given me over the years so I could frame them or something. I finally figured out how to display them!

Check out these horrendous plaques/frames. These used to hang in my dad’s basement displaying team photos from when he was my soccer coach (So cute!). I’ve since taken the photos out because I couldn’t stand to hang them in such an ugly way.

I didn’t want to throw these out, because, like so many other things, I knew I could do something with them. They are really simple, actually. Each frame is made of a piece of wood and a piece of plexiglass. The fasteners up top are pretty much thumb tacks or fancy nails.

After sorting through all of my frames trying to figure out if any would work to display my cards, I stumbled upon these frames. They were tucked at the bottom of a bin, just begging to be used. So I pulled them out and removed the tacks so I could get to work.

I knew I wanted these for my master bathroom, so I pulled out some dark blue paint to spruce these babies up.

After two coats of paint, I started to reassemble the frames.

I foolishly forgot to look at the back of the frame to make sure I was doing this the right way and I ended up putting two of them together upside down. This typically wouldn’t be a huge deal, but since I was impatient and put them together while the paint was the slightest bit tacky, I ended up tearing the cards a little. Thankfully, I didn’t cut the cards up, so only the back of the card was ripped, not the front covers. Phew!

After I had everything lined up, I hammered the nails/tacks back into the frame and hung them up in my bathroom.

They fill in the space right next to our shower perfectly. I am a little worried about how they will do with the moisture in the bathroom because they are pretty much slabs of wood. We’ll see how it goes. It sure looks nice!

I can’t wait for my aunt to see this! She’s gonna get such a kick out of it.

Aren’t these cards gorgeous? Totally frame worthy.

They made such a nice trio!

Thanks for stopping by! And happy Father’s Day!

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