mantel

Up until last week, when you walk in the front door of our house you would see this:

Now the girls are thrilled to have a mantel/fireplace (for Santa and stocking purposes of course) but I've found it a bit awkward and hard to work with.  Its pretty big, its the focal point of the room, it has an arch and bull nose corners, doesn't have a cool mantel, and its off centered.  So for almost 2 years its looked like this.  Doable, but not quite right.  The pottery barn candle holder was in our other house, also above the fireplace also, and I've gotten tired of looking at it.  So without reconstructing the whole area (which I would love to do), I had to make a few simple, inexpensive changes.

In comes Happy Jose.  A handsome man inside an even handsomer frame.  The lady at the thrift store commented that she had been wondering who would buy this portrait (since obviously the people who loved him best didn't even want it).  So I knocked Happy Jose out (not literally), gathered a few other thrift store finds, spray painted them all red and then antiqued them with stain (Ashley Ann will tell you how to do it here).  The frames all sat empty for a while but were crying out for a little something more.  A little something like burlap, paper, and chicken wire.  You can't go wrong with those these days. 

For this frame I bought some chicken wire from Home Depot (the little square kind looked better in this smaller frame) spray painted it brown, cut it to fit the back of the frame, and staple gunned it on.  Its metal so its also magnetic!  Of course it needed a little doily and burlap love as well.

This one got little book paper flags that say faith, hope, and love.

And this one got a little specimen art inspired by this.  To make the twine letter, I printed  and "S" out on card stock and used lots of hemp twine and hot glue to wrap and cover. 

So here you have it.