Gotta Make …

This month, Michelle over at GPP Street Team has challenged us to show how we make it our own, in our art. Either take a commercial item and give it your own special touch, or show how you’ve been inspired by something to create something else with your own personal style. I think both aspects of the challenge are very worth doing. In this post, I’ll be showing the latter. (When you’re done here, click the banner above to check out the challenge and see what everyone else has done.)

This project started when I decided I needed a new apron, because I haven’t found my old one since the move (like a lot of things). Now, I don’t like to cook, but I have to do it, and I’m pretty messy about it. Not only does it save my clothes to wear an apron, but when it is one as cute as this it makes it a little less awful. Since I like to support individual artists and craftsmen, I headed over to etsy.com to find just the right one. It wasn’t easy! Tons of beautiful stuff there, but I fell for this one by Boojiboo. Isn’t it darling? I love this retro look fabric, and the craftsmanship on this is excellent. Click the image to visit her shop.

This project started when I decided I needed a new apron, because I haven’t found my old one since the move (like a lot of things). Now, I don’t like to cook, but I have to do it, and I’m pretty messy about it. Not only does it save my clothes to wear an apron, but an apron this cute takes a little of the drudgery away. Since I like to support individual artists and craftsmen, I headed over to etsy.com to find just the right one. It wasn’t easy! Tons of beautiful stuff there, but I fell for this one by Boojiboo. Isn’t it darling? I love this retro look fabric, and the craftsmanship on this is excellent. Click the image to visit her wonderful shop.

This week, I decided to paint my laundry room a pale warm pink, called abalone. It is going to look great with my retro styled black front loading washer and dryer. I’m still working on it, but decided I needed a little something to dress up the walls. Why not pink birds? I had a few 5″x5″ hardboard squares I’d ordered way back that should work perfectly, because the room is small.  Using the birds on the apron as inspiration, I drew 4 different simple bird shapes.  I started with a base of torn text. I don’t know why, but I just love seeing the words peek through and have to use a page of text or two on practically everything.  Then I stamped on tissue and added that, mostly because I am not very good at stamping and didn’t want to stamp directly on the background in case I got a bad impression. I like the little bit of added texture from the tissue, too. Then, I looked through my small collection of scrapbooking papers to find colors that would work in the room, and I built my birds.  The background paper is wrapped all the way to the back, and I’ve inked the edges in a soft green. I coated everything in mod podge, because a laundry room can be damp. I think they are going to look great in the laundry room.