Personalizing It: Nursery Name Letters

Due to Connor's unexpected earlier-than-anticipated arrival, the nursery still wasn't 100% finished by the time he came home, and thanks to those hectic first months weeks of adjusting to sleep-deprivation life with a new baby, it wasn't until Connor was close to 2 months old that we finally got around to putting his little claim on his nursery: hanging his name in the empty space above his crib.

Before he was born I found some sweet wooden-type letters at Hobby Lobby, and brought them home for $2.00 a piece.

I also purchased orange and yellow paint from Wal-Mart along with a cheapo foam brush (the yellow triangles are painter's pyramids, used for setting your projects on so the edges come out nice).

I wanted the letters to have different shades of orange, going from light-medium-dark-dark-medium-light, so each letter's color varied and it would resemble a small spectrum of color on the wall.

So I mixed up different ratios of paints to come up with the three shades...

and simply painted them on. But, of course, it wasn't quite that easy! They ended up taking about 4 coats of paint each to completely cover up the wood (once again, not using primer first comes back to bite me in the butt!). You can see in the photo below how thin the first coat was...

Once they were painted and dried, it was time to hang! Although, thanks to Connor arriving the day we were planning on hanging the letters, we didn't get around to it until well into 2012. Oops.

We used the moveable velcro 3M picture hanging strips - to save money and because the letters were super-light, we cut each strip into 2 and then stuck 'em on the back of the letter. Then we simply measured where we wanted the letter and stuck it to the wall. We didn't even have to be very exact because we could reposition (thanks to the velro) the letter if it was a little off. Super easy! It definitely made us wish we would've done it earlier (like 2 months earlier)!

All in all we love it. And Connor does, too. It really adds alot of character and pizazz to the room, and it makes us smile everytime we walk into the room. We can even see ourselves in the future teaching Connor how to spell his name by pointing to the letters up there.

It also adds some fun color and excitement to the very-very-neutral-and-chill room, which is just what we were looking for. And to compare, here's the room before...

And now:

Not bad, huh? (Oh, and the colors are a bit different in the photos because the newer pics were taken during the middle of the day, and the previous ones were taken at sunset. Big difference, huh? If you're wondering, the current photos are much closer to the actual colors of the room!).

Have you done any personalizing lately?

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DIY Decor: Letters Within Photos

We've done this project several times in the past for gift-giving, and always receive lots of positive feedback from the recipients once our gift is opened. Originally inspired by a piece of Target art, I remembered thinking "We could do that - except cheaper and better!". From there the project evolved to spell out the name of the recipient, which made it oh-so-personal and unique. We love the gallery-esque style it portrays, and that at first glance the photos might seem random - but upon further inspection actually spell out something. How neat is that?

Want to make this yourself to give it to a lucky recipient or display in your own home? Read on for our step-by-step instructions!

1. Take Photos. To make it, first we went around town snapping photos of things that could resemble letters. A chair becomes the letter "A", a round circular piece of wood within the ceiling at Chipotle becomes an "O", a branch hides an "R" and our porch railing becomes a perfect "C". We even went through a bunch of older photos of vacations and photo projects to find more letters - it was actually pretty fun! Sort of like an intense treasure hunt, haha! We managed to even find a "U" shape once we flipped our photo of the St. Louis Arch upside down.

You could easily do this yourself - just take a look around you and try to find letters within the objects around you. Is there an "I" hidden in the cracks of a sidewalk? Does your desk form a "V"? Is your mailbox an "L"? Or if you are going for a different look, couldn't find all your letters (or just don't want to!), you can always search online. We felt that our personal photos added more to our project, but it is perfectly fine to use letters you found online - your project will still be unique with tons of personality.

2. Find a Frame. We found a perfect frame at Target for this project - for most names/places/words you'll want one that is a rectangle if you want all your letters on the same line, but if you don't mind them on separate lines you could just buy a regular (larger) type of frame. Below is the frame from Target that we used.

Black Float Jackson Frame - 10 x 26"

3. Black and White. Once we had our photos, we just went into Photoshop on the computer and converted them all to black and white (if you don't have Photoshop, there are other programs out there that can do the same, and many cameras also come with a black and white option). Or you could even leave the photos in color for a different look. It's all up to you, really!

4. Measure and Print. Then we measured our frame and counted out how many letters/photos we would insert, and decided that a 4x6 photo size would work perfectly. Then we printed out the photos (we have a borderless printer, but you could easily get them printed at Walgreen or print them yourself on larger paper and count them down if you don't have a borderless printer).

5. Place. Then we measured again, and laid out the photos on top of the frame where we wanted them. Then we simply put a little 2-sided tape on the backs of the photos.

6. Clean. Due to the fact that the frame is a floating frame (there's no matt, just glass), we cleaned all the smudges and fingerprints off the glass and put it together (and even wrote a little note to the recipient and dated the back of one photo).

And that's it!

Total cost? Besides the time spent taking the photos and buying the frame, this project took less than an hour and only ran us the cost of the frame ($30). That's not too bad for a personalized and unique project which makes for a perfect gift - think Christmas, weddings, birthdays, and even baby showers! You can further dress it up and inject a little color by spray painting the frame (we think lime green would be fun!), and you could even add some pretty gift wrap or scrapbooking paper behind the photos for even further personalization! We love that each photo tells a story, and love that it's easy, fun, unique, and light on the wallet - that's our sort of project right there.

What do you guys think? Would this be a project you'd tackle? Have you ever received a unique homemade gift that you absolutely love? Do you have a go-to gift for special occasions?

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DIY to Decorate Your Dwelling: Photo Editing

Welcome to another edition of DIY to Decorate Your Dwelling, which is a series on This Fresh Fossil that's all about how you can easily create your own art for cheap. This tutorial focuses on the post-processing step of editing a photograph (click here to read our previous tutorial on taking great photos even if you don't have an awesome camera) - and editing happens to be my favorite, since a lot of magic can happen here! - but this step is really only optional. If you've taken a good photograph there's not necessarily any need to do any post-processing editing, but usually even a little bit can transform even a good photograph into a great photograph, and also gives you endless options of ways to transform/display it to suite your mood or decor! For this reason, I always heart a little digital love for my photographs.

In this tutorial I will show you all the steps during the editing process that I took to transform this okay-and-decently-composed photo (taken with my little cheapo-depot Canon Digital Elf point-and-shoot camera) into a pretty awesome photo (which you can download already spiffied-up for free right here). These steps are mainly pretty basic, but ones that I take during nearly every photo I edit. I do all my post-processing editing in Adobe Photoshop CS4 (but they should be similar to any other Photoshop version), but by all means you can edit a photo in a number of other programs out there. Photoshop is just what I'm familiar with and use regularly.

Okay, let's get editing!

How To Make Your Photo Awesome
(Click Photos To View Larger)

Like the title? Haha, okay, so here we go.

Grab a favorite photo. In this tutorial I will be using this still-life closeup of a flower. If you'd like to follow along with all the steps in the tutorial, just click here to download this photo.

Open your photo of choice in Photoshop.

First we'll make a layer copy of our image, in case we make a mistake during editing. Press CTL+A and then CTL+C, then go to your layers panel and create a new layer. Press CTL+V to paste the image into the new layer. We'll be working on the new photo layer we just created during this tutorial.

Sometimes when you're shooting, dust will be on the lens of your camera and will appear in the photo later. See all the dust specks and lines on the left side petals of the photo? We need to remove those.

Select the Clone Stamp Tool. This will replace one section of an image with an area that you've sampled. Hover your mouse over a normal area close to the dust specks, and press the ALT key. Your mouse will turn into a target. While still holding down the ALT key, click on a normal part of the image (close to the dust speck) to take a sample. Once you've taken a sample of the image, place your cursor over the dust speck and click. Tada! The dust disappears under the sample area you've replaced it with. You can adjust the Clone Stamp brush size, hardness and opacity. For photos I usually set the hardness to 0% and keep the opacity around 80-100%.

As you can see above, all the dust specks are gone.

Now we'll move on. Select Layer 1 (your new layer) and click on the little circle thing on the bottom of the Layers Panel. This will create a new fill or adjustment layer. Select Levels on the drop-down menu.

The Levels diagram will pop up with something like a mountain in-between the tabs on the bottom. This represents the black, white and gray of your photo - similar to the Brightness/Contrast. Usually you want the black tab to be at the end of the "mountain", the middle gray to be somewhere near the peak, and the white on the right side to be near the beginning of the mountain/peak. But you can play around with it until you get a good exposure and contrast you like.

Now create another new adjustment layer by clicking the circle on the bottom of the Layers Panel again, and selecting Hue/Saturation.

This will bring up a panel that represents all the colors in the photo, which can be easily changed. Select "Red" from the drop down menu at the top.

Now adjust the Hue slider until the red in the photo turns yellow (another option is to check the "Colorize" box at the bottom).

I then went through the rest of the colors in the photo and desaturated them, making them black and white.

Our photo is a bit grainy and has tons of noise in it. So select Layer 1 and go to Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise from the toolbar at the top.

In the following screen that pops up, adjust the strength and other elements until you have a good image with less noise but good detail.

Now create another Adjustment Layer within the Layers Panel, and this time select Curves from the dropdown menu. This will give your photo a bit more punch.

Adjust the points on the graph slightly to create more interest and give your photo more life. Play around with it until you like what you have.

Look good? Now you should have a great photo with tons of interest and pop, and it's probably a far cry from where it started out, isn't it? By all means you can stop here if you're happy with your photo, but if you want a special effect on it you can do this extra step.

Select Layer 1 in the Layers Panel, and go to Filter>Filter Gallery in the toolbar at the top of your screen.

This will bring up a preview of your photo with all sorts of fun filters that can be applied for tons of different effects and looks. I selected the Watercolor filter and played around with the sliders until I was happy with the result.

Tada! You're done!

Now that wasn't so hard, was it? You have just created yourself a one-of-a-kind piece of art, and on the cheap, too! Although all of these steps don't have to be followed to edit a photo at all - these are just what I used (some being basics I always use) to create a photo that really pops and stands on it's own. Next in this series of tutorials we'll print, frame and hang it so we can always enjoy our on-the-cheap decor!

What do you guys think? Are you fans of Photoshop? Do you use other image-editing software? Did you enjoy the tutorial? Have any other tips to add? Do tell!

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Paint Your Windows the Easy Way

When we bought our house, we never knew that we would soon become window-painting-experts. But then again, we never imagined we would tear out asbestos tiles or dig up a buried cement patio, either. Regardless, painting windows is a pain. Seriously. It is no fun. It makes painting any room take about 3  times as long, so we've tried numerous attempts at various methods (involving taping and chapstick) until we found our favorite (and also the quickest and easiest!).

How to Easily Paint Windows

1) Gather your prepping supplies. We use a sanding block to sand off any rough spots and then caulk for a seamless finish.

2) Sand the rough areas and caulk any corners.

We usually smooth out the bead of caulk with a wet finger (and keep a wet paper towel handy) for a seamless finish.

3) Paint! Don't worry about getting paint on the glass. Actually, the more paint on the glass the better (just keep reading, trust me).

4) Once your paint is fully dry (we waited a couple days), it's time to finish. Score the paint along the window frame using light pressure with a box cutter. Or, in case you can't find yours (like us), a carpet cutter-knife will work, too. Remember: score the dry paint but don't press too hard.

5) Use a razor blade and follow your scored line. Apply pressure and hold the razor blade at a 60 degree angle for best results.

6) Gather your paint shavings and simply toss them in the trash.

7) Hang your window treatments.

8) Enjoy!

Yup, we're pretty happy that we're not living in a fishbowl anymore, and love the texture that the bamboo blinds bring to our hard-surface-and-black-and-white kitchen.

What about you guys? How do you like to tackle painting windows? Have you tried any other methods we didn't mention? Or are you lucky enough not to have to paint windows?

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