I am a big believer in taking an ordinary thing and tweaking it to make it extraordinary. This is a bookend shaped like a french horn that I found and painted blue to have a fun, subtle, "How I met Your Mother" reference in my living room. The bookend was metal so, it had to be primed and painted in several coats to allow the paint to stay but, the overall effect ended up being spectacular. Plus, whenever someone comes into my apartment and catches the reference, it makes my day :)
I am not going to go into a lot of "scrap" details but, for inspiration when I used to scrap, I always put together everything and anything I could get my hands on. The pages shown are compiled of photos, stickers, greeting cards, magazine clippings, newspapers, movie tickets, and essentially anything else that was flat enough to be put into a book. For one of my books, I burnt CD's of music from our high school years and decorated them as art too, pasting them in the pages, the idea being in 20 years we could take them out and listen while flipping through. Yes, cheesy. But that is the idea of a scrapbook, to be cheesy! My suggestion for anyone scrapping, if you want to make a beautiful book, put EVERYTHING you have from the times you're portraying onto the pages. The more random, the more beautiful the picture will become. Menus, key chains, postcards, chop sticks, match boxes... collect and add. I promise, it's worth being eclectic.
This was once a painting I was working on that, I just couldn't get right. I decided to make it PERFECT by taking a sheet from Target, trimming and pinning it to fit the canvas frame. It is the perfect wall art for a HUGE blank wall in the dining area of my apartment. And it was super cheap, which is always a must for my decor.
This is a $4 Target mirror that I bought along with a roll of contact paper and some glass paint to make some wall art for my kitchen. All I did was cut out the letters in contact paper to make up the quote I wanted, peeled them onto the mirror, and then painted over the entire glass with red paint, (red glass paint and then an opaque acrylic over that). Once it dried, I went back and unpeeled the contact paper, which revealed the mirror-writing underneath. I love this piece... It was so cheap and it looks so fun in our space! For those of you who are not nerds, the quote is from Harry Potter and reads "Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light". When people come into my kitchen and recognize Dumbledore's words, it is almost a subtle test of how awesome their personality really is.
I have this hanging over my desk for childish inspiration. A couple of photos from my family's trip to Disney, my mouse ears, and some other Disney trinkets. I painted the back of the matte pink, pinned in the photos, and hot glued to arrange the remaining items.
