more craftiness!

So with summer giving me lots of extra time to paint and create, I have been hard at work in what will one day be our nursery. Painting the vines on the wall I knew would take me a good week's worth of time and we really wanted to build a palm tree...so that was going to take some ingenuity. So here's what we've ended up with:

The room looks like a wreck, but just pay attention to the walls. :) I painted every vine and leave by hand, just me a my paintbrush. It took me about 25 hours and each vine has 3-4 coats of paint. You can't tell from the pictures, but they are glossy finished which makes the light shine off of them. I am IN LOVE with this room!

Next we worked on the Palm tree. We started with an old floor lamp that Joe had....similar to this one.

Joe took it apart and cut the wiring out. Then we got some PVC pipe and fastened is to the lamp frame with epoxy and filled it with sand to weigh it down a little. I played with how to make leaves and found something that worked really well. I made "leaf shaped pillow cases" out of green felt and made a frame to hold it up and make it bendable with floral wire and a coat hanger. The cool part was, we found a way to make it where we can arch the middle by pushing the wire forward and backward. It was a happy discovery! Then we slide the frame in and sew it all up.

Here they are all bunched up as a "bouquet" and wired together so we can feed them into the pipe.

And here's the finished tree! I am SO proud of it!

Joe finished up the top of the dresser while I was busy with the vines. The boy did good! Here's his finished project!