My latest craft projects- Part I: Paintings

I tend to go through phases when it comes to crafts. One month I'll be into scrapbooking, the next month all I'll want to do is knit scarves. I've had to scale back on my crafting time considerably since Juliana was born, but recently, what with my dad and my mother-in -law retiring, I've had a lot more time to dedicate to making things. Earlier this year, I found a blank artist's canvas in a box of my old crafting supplies. I had just seen an episode of Martha Stewart, where she decorated a plain canvas tote bag by painting leaves and pressing them to the canvas (tutorial here). I thought it sounded like a great idea for my old blank canvas, so I gave it a try with some paints that coordinated well with our linens in our bedroom- green for the background, with gold and chocolate brown pressed leaves.


I thought it turned out pretty good, but the canvas looked too small to hang anywhere in our room by itself, so I bought two more in the same size and painted them both in the same color scheme, but opposite- chocolate brown background, with gold and green leaves this time- and hung them over the bed in a row.

When I had gone to JoAnn's to buy the canvases, I found that they had a really big selection of canvases for pretty reasonable prices, so I thought I'd be brave and buy a 16"x24" canvas- the biggest I'd ever gotten. I had colors in mind, but that was about it. So I searched Google Images for bamboo, cherry blossoms, trees- anything that was drawn as a silhouette, because I'm not the best painter =) I found a great drawing of a kind of African-looking tree, so I enlarged it, cut it out, traced it onto the canvas and painted it. Cam had the idea for making the sun rays fade out and Tawnya had the idea to off center the tree. So it was a bit of a collaboration, idea-wise. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.


Since I thought that painting was kind of Asian-looking, plus we have a lot of other Asian art in our room, I decided to paint something representative of my background: Swedish. So I thought I'd paint a phrase or saying or something simple in Swedish, along with the famous Dala horse, and some other folksy-looking decoration around the border. I started googling Swedish prayers and found a wikipedia page with the Lord's prayer translated into many different languages, including Swedish. This prayer was something waaaaay longer than I intended to do for this painting, but once the idea was there, I really wanted to do it. I remembered seeing a long, narrow canvas at JoAnn's that would be perfect for this. The problem was that I have terrible handwriting, so how would I make this look nice? I finally came up with the idea of buying a large pack of alphabet letters intended for scrapbooking, sectioning off the canvas where I wanted the lines to be, and spelling the prayer out in the letters. I then painted over the stickers in the barn red color I'd picked out. Once it was all dry, I peeled off the stickers, did some touch-ups with white paint, and voila! Perfect lettering! I used the same method to paint the Dala horse as I did with the tree in my last painting, added some fair isle stars and I was done.


I made a smaller painting for my Grandma Gerhardt after this one- just a short, Swedish table prayer with a border of small Dala horses and Swedish hearts, but I didn't take any pictures before I gave it to her.

And thus ended my painting phase (for now). Next time......Sewing!