Love Is Spoken Here

I’m sharing with you one of my Christmas gifts from my DH today combined with my Valentine’s Day Mantel.

This family photo was my favorite of all the ones taken.  My Christmas gift from the hubster included this beautiful canvas.  I really wish I could hang the canvas up on the stone centered in between the top of the shutters and the mantel.  Problem is, I don’t want to drill 2 holes into the stone for screws in order to hang it up.  I contemplated using the command strips, but I really believe the canvas would be too heavy for those.  This is my compromise even though I really think the shutters are too tall for the photo.  It’s my fault since I made the shutters.  You can see how here.

I was completely and utterly thrilled to find the yarn wrapped ‘love’ idea online.  I will have to research again where I got the idea and credit her.  It’s super easy.  All I did was take my 18″ green floral wire and bent it to create the letters.  The ‘L’ took up one wire, ‘ov’ took up another wire, and ‘e’ was about half a wire.  Take your yarn and wrap it around, it’s as simple as that…time consuming, but simple.  TIP:  If I were to go back and make another one, I would wrap the wire FIRST with the yarn and then bend into letters.  I did it the other way around and I think it might be easier to do it the opposite.  I hot glued the yarn wrapped ‘Love’ onto the shutter.  It will be easy to take off  in the future and not leave a mess.

“Is Spoken Here” are chip board letters taken out of my scrapbooking stash.  It’s funny, I’ve been using my scrapbooking supplies for more non-scrapbooking things than actual making scrapbook pages.  I used my trusty re-positionable dot glue to glue them onto the shutters.  This way I know they will come off cleanly when I am ready to take them down.

Thanks to Heidi Swapp & My Craft Channel I learned how to make the cute heart garland out of scrapbook paper, maps and book paper.  If you want to learn how to make them go here.

You see the shelf over the television?  I asked the builder to add that shelf because I like to use all available space if possible.  My intention was to display photos there.  Problem is, whenever I put photos up there, you can barely see them.  It’s kind of hard to explain, but long story short, I have had a heck of a time staging/beautifying {whatever you want to call it} that stinking shelf.  So I have seen other people take books and place them in their shelves backwards and I liked the look.  I thought, “why not try it?”  I went through the house and took all of our hard bound books, took off the covers and shoved them in.  I really like it!  I decided I like the look of the sizes mismatched throughout too.  I think the off white color of the book pages brings continuity from the off white of the shutters.  What do you think?

This is what the other side of my living room looks like now.  Isn’t it lovely? I have 2 new photos from Christmas I’m adding to this wall so I needed to reconfigure the gallery.  Back to the drawing board.  This means time to take out the Power Puff Girls Christmas wrapping paper I will never use to wrap gifts with again.  I trace the frames onto the wrapping paper {turned it over to the white side, of course} and use the templates to figure out how I want it to look.  This will be a week or so long process for me to get it where it looks right.  I use paint tape to tape the templates to the wall.  It comes off easy and doesn’t hurt the paint for me to rearrange multiple times.  The items on the ground are what will be going up there.  Yesterday I covered up 26 nail holes from the previous wall gallery.  The Nester would be proud of me.   Hubby will be proud to know I filled the holes in good and painted over…good as new!

Before I head out for my 3 mile run today {in the rain} I want to again THANK everyone who has generously taken time to complete my short survey.  It means a LOT to me.  The feedback is highly valuable.  It’s not too late to take the survey.  I will keep it open for about a week before tabulating the results.  It’s completely anonymous and you don’t have to answer every question if you don’t want to.  Whatever you can give is very gracious.

Linking Up:

Have a SUPER DAY,