Hi Friends! The blog is back! Nothing like spending hours at home with a newborn to get my creative juices flowing :P.
Here's a sneak peak of our nursery. It's been half done for months and I'm excited to share the full reveal soon. But first, a story of how I created $13 art for the feature wall.
When I first starting thinking about the nursery design, of course, I was all over Pinterest. I wanted something simple and bold, and mostly gender neutral. When deciding on the design, I needed to think about what would work with our current room color and the room size. First of all the room is tiny, only 9 ft by 9 ft, so we had to keep things super simple. Second, there’s only one good wall to place the crib, so that had to be my feature wall. Third, we already had a light blue-gray color on the walls which we were keeping (which we changed from baby pink, the color it was when we moved in.)
That being said, I fell IN LOVE with this nursery. I mean that wallpaper, am I right?
It was magical and after stalking it online, I learned that the wallpaper design was meant to mimic the Japanese Wave – inspired by this famous art piece. I thought it was whimsical and would make the room more dynamic but also very fitting to our lives, as we’re both from an island, Puerto Rico and we visited Japan in 2015 and loved it.
However, I got a wake up call when I realized it would cost close to $400 to cover our 9 x 9 ft wall and most of it will be hidden by the crib!! With baby on the way and saving for daycare being more important than wallpaper (boo), I needed to find another solution because I COULD NOT STOP THINKING ABOUT THAT WALLPAPER! So I found cheaper options on Etsy, but not by much. I ordered a sample from Etsy and once it arrived, I hung it for a few weeks in the room. Everyone that walked into the room agreed that it was awesome.
A few weeks later, I had somehow forgotten about budget and I was like I can’t stop thinking about this wallpaper so I’m just going to get it. I go to order and oh that’s right, it’s going to cost over $350. So I was like Carlos I want to buy this but it’s this much… He was like WHAT and I was like yea it’s a lot but I love it and it’s going to transform the room, blah blah and well he said no, no way we’ll pay that much for wallpaper.
Well I normally would make a case if I feel really strongly, but a part of me was like OK maybe I can come up with something else.
Then around the same time, I was inspired by two people on Instagram who had done some handmade art in their homes and I thought, OK I’ll just recreate it in canvas, it would be a really fun project to do over maternity leave. So I bought 5 canvas boards at Michael’s for $12.99. I knew I already had some paint that would work from other projects. Then I had to figure out how to recreate it.
I went down the rabbit hole on YouTube about how to trace the pattern unto the canvas and the technique I learned actually worked! But the wallpaper itself was way too detailed and it would take me forever just to trace. So I tried to freehand it. And since it was pretty much a consistent repeating pattern, it wasn’t too hard. When my friends came over, they saw what I was working on and said they liked the canvas version better than the original wallpaper
sample – score!
It was a perfect project for maternity leave because I was going CRAZY in the first week. It had been a long time since I took care of a baby and I forgot that you literally sit around all day with baby, I needed a project LOL. Also I think my hormones were making me feel all sorts of intense emotions, so it was nice to focus on something therapeutic. So while my husband or my mother in law held the baby for a few hours a day, I focused on the paintings. It took a while cause it was very detailed but I love the results. And it only cost me $13 since I had the paint and of course, lots of patience lol.
Let me know what you think!