silhouette art

About a month ago, my parents lost their (almost) 13 year old golden retriever/beagle mix. Who are we kidding...she was mostly beagle. Her personality made her a unique member of the household and she is missed terribly. All of us kids grew up with Rosie in the house and we have a lot of fond memories with her.

This picture truly represents her in the best way. It was taken a few years ago - she was sitting in the kitchen, on her butt, begging for someone to feed her. This picture is how I remember our sweet Rosie and I thought it would be the perfect picture to use to make a sweet silhouette memento for my parents.

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Here's what you'll need to make your own: printed picture scissors and/or exacto knife black (or dark) paper white (or light)paper glue stick pencil/color pencil for tracing frame _________________________________________ [STEP 1] Print out a picture to the size you need. I just made a basic print from my computer. Carefully cut around the image with scissors or an exacto knife. Try to keep as much detail as you possibly can.

[STEP 2]

Trace the inverse of your image onto the black paper. Carefully cut out this image.

[STEP 3]

Glue your silhouette to a white background and put into a frame. After this step, your husband might think you bought it on Etsy.

[STEP 4]

Enjoy your new silhouette picture. This one got wrapped up and shipped to my parents for Valentine's Day.

Here are a few more pictures of our sweet Rosie dog:

[p.s. this post may be linked to any number of these blogs]

picture wall

Ever since we bought our house in May, the hallway that leads from our main living space back to our bedrooms seemed so long and daunting. At over 13’ long we had a lot of wall space to deal with. We knew that one or two pictures weren’t going to cut it…they would get lost all on their own. When I stumbled across this picture on Pinterest I knew I wanted to recreate a similar look for our hallway:

hallway from Pinterest

our hallway

I thought creating those two horizontal lines was going to be the trickiest part. Nothing in a 1950’s home is completely square and even. Everything is a little bit wonky – which adds charm and character but makes hanging pictures straight more difficult. Luckily Adam had a laser level that had been his grandfathers.

We started by figuring out where we wanted the tops of our bottom rows of pictures to be and where the bottoms of the top row of pictures should be. We decided to created a 5” horizontal void between the two rows. We put a small finishing nail in the wall and hung the laser level on it. Once level, we ran a line of blue painters tape along the laser line. We moved the nail up 5 inches, leveled it again, and ran a second line of blue painters tape across the wall. We figured that 2 small nail holes would be easy to patch – and I believe doing this method we avoided a lot of other “oops” nail holes along the way (trust me – there were still a few, but luckily they are being disguised by our newly hung pictures).

After we had the prep work done, we took our collection of picture frames and started laying them out on the family room floor. Having them all laid out the way we wanted them made it easy to pick up a frame, take it into the hallway and hang it in the correct order. Having a game plan of where each frame went saved us a lot of time and headache because 1) we knew exactly where all the frames were going before we started and 2) if we didn’t like the layout when they were on the ground, they were a lot easier to move around than opposed to moving them around after they had been nailed up on the wall.