For a year, my roommates and I sat in our living room with
nothing hanging above our pretty big sectional besides a tiny picture I found
at Home Goods. And for a year, I wondered what the heck to put there.
I pinned a lot of ideas for artwork over the wall to
Pinterest but just wasn’t quite sure what I liked. One thing I was sure of? We
needed large artwork of some kind and I needed it cheap.
We came close to getting one option: a series of four
vintage
Mademoiselle cover prints from Z Gallerie. But at $50, it was out of my
budget and I wasn’t even sure if four pictures would like good enough in this
space.
While those prints were the right ones for us, I still found
myself gravitating to vintage fashion prints. I love a pretty fashion print,
and, like I mentioned with my Christmas tree, living with three girls is the
perfect time to embrace something girly in our living room.
I especially liked this gallery wall that I saw on
Pinterest:
Then One day I saw this picture on Pinterest:
When I clicked on the source blog I found that it was a
gallery of vintage Barbie prints. And when I Googled “Vintage Barbie”
(naturally), I found the Barbie calendar.
Ding! (That’s the sound of a light bulb turning on above my
head).
This isn’t the first time I’ve used calendars for artwork.
In college I took apart a calendar and put up all over my dorm room. When I did
it then it looked ridiculous, but I always maintained, like many other
bloggers, that calendars can be a great source of affordable artwork.
I picked up the 2012 Barbie Calendar at Bed Bath, and
Beyond. I wasn’t sure how many of the prints I wanted to use – I was thinking 6
or 8 in large frames with big mats. I figured I would probably paint the frames
because our living room is kind of lacking in the color department,.
It seems that framing section at Michael’s is perpetually on
sale, so I figured I could get a pretty good deal on a group of their nicer
frames. My first option was a group of six 12x16 frames. They were originally
$30, marked down to $15. Which still sounded like a lot when I was thinking
about buying six of them.
Not to mention, the price of mats big enough to fit in the frame
put the total for each one over $20, making this project ring in to the tune of
$150—a whole lot more than I was trying to spend.
My second option was a matted frame around the same size as
option one for $12.99 each. When I did the math of six or eight of those
babies, it was still pretty pricey.
Then I looked at the shelf above option two. There, I found
a 10x13 frame matted to 8x10 for $5. I hadn’t really thought about displaying
all twelve pictures, but at this price it was my cheapest option. So I took
home 12 frames in white and oatmeal (since I was planning to paint them
anyway).
First, I placed all 12 picture frames on the floor in two
rows of six to see how large it would be.
It didn’t seem very big on the floor,
but I wanted to see what it was like on the wall just to be sure. To do this, I
used scrap paper and catalogs to make a template for each frame, and hung them
on the wall with painter’s tape.
 |
We call this photo "channeling our inner teenage boy".
Yes, those are pages of one of the 50 Victoria's Secret catalogs we receive every week. |
I decided I liked all 12 frames, so I proceeded with my
plans to paint them. I settled on a
lavender spray paint with one or two frames painted a darker purple. First I
took all the mats and glass out of the frames.
Then I placed the frames on a matt outside and painted the
frames in shifts so that I could get around them easily. I decided to put a
layer of primer on the frames because they weren’t real wood and I hope that
the Primer would help the spray paint adhere.
Once I finished the frames, I moved on to cutting the Barbie
prints out of the calendar.
First, I removed the staples from the centerfold of the
calendar. Then, I cut each piece of paper down the fold with a craft knife. I
had to keep reminding myself that the calendar pattern was on the back of half
of the images in the calendar.
Many of the prints were actually bigger than 8x10 opening,
so I broke out my high school yearbook knowledge and used the mat to crop each
picture. I tried my best to include the feet as much as I could, but I ended up
having to cut some of them off. I’m hoping that unlike a photo on a yearbook
page, it looks a little bit artistic and not silly.
I cut the images slightly smaller than the whole mat so that
I could tape them to the back of the mat exactly as I liked them.
Once everything was cropped and taped, I put the glass and
mats and prints in the frames and began the very tedius hanging process. I
tried to make life easier for myself and our walls by using 3M Command Strips
to hang the frames. That way we would have fewer holes to patch when we moved
out (we live in a rental) and it would be a lot easier to hang them precisely
in a grid.
I started from the a top center picture and worked my way
out until I hung 6 frames in a row. I used a combination method of a ruler and
a level to mark where on the wall I needed to hang the frames.
Once I hung the
top row, I moved on to the bottom, again making my way out from the center.
Then I stepped back and looked at the whole thing and determined I needed to
make some adjustments. Luckily the frames were easily to remove from the wall,
so I eyeballed the adjustments until everything was straight.
Well...I wish it was perfectly straight. This is not a good
project for extremely perfectionists because it seems almost impossible to get
the entire grid to look right. But it’s good enough.
The first time around I had only painted one frame dark
purple. Once everything was on the wall I decided it needed another dark
accent, so I took a frame down, pulled the glass and print out of it, and
re-sprayed it a darker color.
And voila! Vintage fashion print artwork gallery over our
couch.
Some of the places that I found the Barbie calendar show it
as art in a kid’s room, but I think it works here. In fact, most people have no
idea that they’re Barbie prints when they see the arrangement. I know it’s
super girly, but like I said before, when else will I be able to do something
so girl in my living room?
I haven’t even told you my favorite part about this whole
thing. The price!
Here’s the budget breakdown:
Barbie Calendar - $12
12 Frames x $5 each - $60
Primer Spray Paint – had already
Lavender Spray Paint x 2 - $7
Dark purple spray paint - $3.50
Artwork Total: $82.50
The Command Strips added about $20 to the budget, but
they’ll save us money when we don’t have to patch holes before we move, and I
would’ve had to pay for mounting hardware regardless of what art I bought. So
for a little over $100, we have art above our couch.
$100 still always sounds like a lot of money to me, but I
know that this is a great value for the price, especially considering that the
price per framed print came in under $10 each. AND then there’s this fun piece
of info.
The original Barbie inspiration piece? Well, I followed it
to the source and found that
the prints displayed on the wall sell for $100
EACH! And if I wanted to, I could’ve probably painted the frames a similar
color to the high-end prints to make them like even more similar. There are
definitely ways to dress these babies up even more.
So there you have it, a $1200 piece of artwork done for
$100. Can I get a woohoo?
Has anyone else done something cool with calendars as art? I
plan to keep using them and even recycle my 2011 letterpress calendar that hung
on the wall in my cube at work. But that project requires more materials so it
will have to wait until after No Shop January!
Speaking of No Shop January, today was a success! I was at
work late and very tempted to pick up a pizza on the way home, but I resisted
the temptation and cooked up chicken tacos when I got home. Score one for me.
