Hi again!
Thanks for all the fun and encouraging comments so far this week—I have to say, I'm astonished that it took me so long to find those little badge holders as it sounds like so many of you have been hoarding a package or two for years now!
Today I'm sharing my own #37/52 projects (this five in one week business is moving things right along!): Turn a sad wall into a happy wall with items you already have on hand. Chances are that somewhere in your house or apartment you have a lonely nook or corner or hallway that you're required to walk past every single day... I loved reading a comment left earlier this week by Kathleen S. about how she actually enjoys hanging out in her spruced up laundry room—the effect of turning your attention to a space that could be so much better is powerful indeed!
I purposely kept this project to the confines of a small wall space, and I purposely set the parameters that I had to "shop my house" for the items I'd use to gussy it up. I loosely wanted to create a kind of dynamic scrapbook-page-on-my-wall though I decided not to use actual scrapbook pages. The space I chose was the landing by the back door, which leads to the basement of our 1906 House. It is the wall closest to where the box elders congregate when the temperature is above 45º (ick) and the wall I pass by it every time I do laundry (which is a lot). Those three things definitely meet the qualifications of a sad wall: closest to the creepy old basement, bug hangout, and the constant tracks of neverending laundry.
Here it is, far cheerier than before:
The most fun part of this project was the "shopping the house" part. I had to either make it or find it or repurpose it—not an additional penny was spent putting it all together.
A few notes about what I used: I took the glass out of two of the frames so I could put something three-dimensional inside; the frames were already kind of deep, so it worked perfectly to velcro up some of the rocks the girls picked out at a gem and mineral show we went to last year and hot-glue a bouquet of button flowers they made over Christmas break 2009. The middle frame holds another of the post cards I made for my fridge makeover project (and the other favorite Avett Brothers line!). I didn't get a poster calendar this year (I've had inexpensive poster calendars the last 3-4 years in a cheapie poster frame just for pretty) and I already bought a cool Etsy one for my Gracie/Owl mini-album, so I made one myself to fit another frame I had on hand. The snowman art is courtesy of Gracie and the leftover bulldog clip holds a seasonal greeting card. The ladybugs are made by the same company (Tomy); I got one when I was 5 and Gracie somehow spotted the modernized version at the Butterfly Pavilion gift shop this summer when she was five, which we think is very funny. The final touch is the miniature photo frame that holds a picture of a rabbit. The Year of the Rabbit is coming up, which is extremely appropriate because we have a family of rabbits that lives in our yard. We call them yard bunnies (hence the 2011: The Year of the Yard Bunny caption, ha ha).
The plan is to come back to this little wall display monthly and change a few things here and there to keep it interesting, all the while looking through what we already have to put on display. It's about as untraditional of a scrapbook page as you might get, but it still feels scrapbook-y to me. You might make your own display smaller or larger depending upon your space—the only real requirement is that it should make you happier than the plain wall did before.
: )
