High street art at a low street price

I originally blogged about this DIY project on my old blog, DTTD imagine.design.create

This is seriously one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways to create awesome original art. I was inspired by this beautiful piece that KariAnne at Thistlewood Farm made.

And this was KariAnne’s inspiration – which costs £200 at Not On The High Street. WTF?! At that price, I’d hate to know what IS on the High Street! ;-)

For a grand total of $4.00, my version is most definitely low street. And that’s fine with me, ‘cause I love it and it saved me about $396.00CDN :-)

Want to make one too? It’s easy! All you need is a canvas, stick-on letters {mine are from the Dollar Store}, and paint.

The hardest part {which really isn’t hard at all} is creating the “broken” heart shape, You want both sides of the heart to be pretty much symmetrical, and you have to make all the letters fit right. Once you’ve got that figured out, just stick on the letters and add a few coats of paint.

I used a combination of grey & white paint and applied it on at an angle. Just ‘cause that’s how I roll :-) And that’s it! Told you it was easy ;-)

I’m probably going to glue this little starfish to the canvas. I just want to be absolutely sure it’s what I want to do before I commit! What do you think?

Have you created a high street at a low end price recently?

Happy weekend!

Linking up to….

PARA Paints Colour Forecast Palette

Wondering what some of the hot colours for 2013 are? Wonder no more! PARA Paints Colour Forecast Palette consists of 75 of PARA’s hottest trend colours. The vibrant & edgy palette ranges from hues of mauve & lavender, to peacock teals & sapphire seas, to contemporary accents of tangy oranges and happy yellows. The colours were selected to encourage creative energy and are complemented with neutrals of bleached translucent pastels, faded jeans, and tactile earth tones. These are just a few of the beautiful colours that caught my eye and have got my furniture makeover juices flowing!

Now that you’ve got all these great colours to choose from, how do you figure out what colours go together? PARA’s got you covered with their ColourSquare Colour Coordinating Tool. You’ll be an expert at combining colours for walls, draperies, rugs, and accessories in no time!

“PARA’s new Forecast Palette and ColourSquare Colour Coordinating Tool is the perfect design solution for anyone looking to create a décor scheme that harmonizes colours together just like an expert. With this, people will be able to use the in-store PARA display to help create an individual colour palette of cutting-edge, trend colours that have been professionally-matched with stylish neutrals, thus making the task of choosing colours easier, faster and more cohesive for the consumer.”

~ Garry Belfall, Senior Brand Manager for PARA Paints ~

The PARA colour pallete and coordinating tool will be officially released at IDS13 in Toronto at the end of January. But you can go to the PARA web site right now to check out the colours and see how the tool works online. PARA’s made it so easy – just drag the ColourSquare Colour Coordination Tool to the colour that you like, and the tool window will show you what colours coordinate with your selected colour. For example, these here are three colours that coordinate with PF64 Tahitian Pearl:

There are a total of 56 coordinating colour groupings in a “patchwork” formation that will help you to choose the perfect colour palette. And PARA’s Colour Forecast Palette will provide customers with the largest take-home colour samples in the industry, so you just can’t go wrong!

I’ve got a little something in mind for my next PARA Paints Blog Crew project using a couple of colours form the new palette and this dumpster dive find:

Check out the PARA Paints Colour Forecast Palette and let me know what colours you’d use in your home.

These are a few of my favourite things

Seeing as my word for 2013 is POSITIVITY, I thought I’d start writing some blog posts about my favourite things – anything from music to books to food to a beautiful room. So here we go with the first instalment…

Recent pins

These images caught my eye recently…

Image via dailymai.co.uk

Image via Houzz | Design by Peace Design

Image via Design Seeds

The Girl Who Came Home

We all know how every movie and book about Titanic ends, but I highly recommend reading The Girl Who Came Home by Hazel Gaynor. She has woven together fact and fiction to create a beautiful story that focuses on a 17 year old girl named Maggie Murphy who, with thirteen other people form her Irish town of Ballysheen, sails on Titanic. Most have dreams of starting new lives in America, but Maggie is filled with heartache from leaving her beloved Seamus behind.

You know how sometimes you get to the end of a book and you’re like, “whaaaaaa, huhhhhh, noooooo, that’s a crappy ending!”? Well, that doesn’t happen with this book! I literally felt my heart beat faster at times, and I was up late every night this past week reading.

If you want to be completely surprised by how the story unfolds, don’t read too much about the true-life facts that it’s based on. I’ll just tell you that there really were 14 Irish emigrants from County Mayo in Ireland who sailed on Titanic. They’re known as The Addergoole Fourteen.

Cowboy boots

It’s been ages since I wore cowboy boots, but I saw a giveaway from Country Outfitter for these ones on Facebook, and I think it’s time to get in touch with my inner cowgirl again :-)

Seriously, how cool are these purple and zebra print boots…

  

Thai food

Pizza is THE perfect food – I could eat it for every meal, every day. But I also love Thai food. I’ve tried making a number of Thai dishes at home. Most of them require ingredients that I don’t normally have on hand and are pretty involved. But I’ve come across two recipes that are easy to make and delicious!

Red Curry Poached Cod from She Cooks He Cleans
This is a great way to get fish in your diet. You could also make it with chicken or beef or a combination of seafoods.

Thai Prawn Mange Salad with Nam Jim Dressing from Cook Republic
I have a favourite mango salad at Pookies Thai here in Ottawa, and this one ranks pretty close.

And those are a few of my favourite things this week :-) Have you come across any favourite things lately?

Beautiful new Brizo Vuelo

As I’ve mentioned more than once {because I’m just a little bit obsessed!}, we’ll be installing Virage faucets from Brizo on in our master bathroom – assuming hubby ever gets to the point of actually installing faucets ;-) I’m a huge fan of Brizo, and was excited to see their latest faucet design, the Vuelo:

 

You can totally see the inspiration from a swan…

I love the Cocoa Bronze/Stainless Steel finish. I saw the Charlotte lavatory faucet in the Cocoa Bronze finish last January at IDS12, and it’s even more gorgeous in real life than in pictures.

Do you have a favourite Brizo faucet?

All faucet images from Brizo, swan image from Wikipedia

Welcome to 2013!

So the Mayans were wrong and the world didn’t end on December 21, 2012 :-) Now that we’ve made it to 2013, what are we going to do with the year?

Painting
After taking the foil painting workshop with Susan Bailie from Art Walls in November, I couldn’t wait to try more paintings. I bought all the supplies a week after the workshop, and finally got around to putting them to good use over the holidays. Susan is doing another workshop this month – if you’re in Ottawa and want to learn how to create the coolest paintings, check it out on her Art Walls Facebook page.

Fostering more dogs for Catahoula Rescue Ontario
Being a small part of saving sweet dogs who might not otherwise have a chance at a new and better life is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. Not only have I had the chance to enjoy some super-amazing dogs, I’ve also met and become friends with some super-amazing people who work so hard to help dogs in need. It won’t make me rich or famous, but I’d much rather have a life filled with doggie snuggles & kisses than fame & fortune :-)

You gotta accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative
Towards the end of 2012, I decided to try and focus on only positive status updates on my Facebook page. It was just a little thing, but it felt good to not whine and complain about the idiot in the SUV who cut me off on my way to work (who, me whine? Never!) So going a step farther and taking inspiration from Shelley at House of Smiths, I’ve decided that my Word of the Year for 2013 is POSITIVITY. From Urban Dictionary:
pos-i-tiv-i-ty noun

1. Positivity is staying positive even when you find a really good reason to be negative.

2. An outlook on life that involves seeing and focusing on the good aspects of a situation, no matter what the circumstances.

I’m letting go of the stuff that brings me down, and focusing on the stuff that lifts me up and makes me happy. Life is too short to waste time on people and things that aren’t worth wasting time on.

Around the house
Finish the master bathroom renovation. I haven’t posted about the bathroom reno lately because not much has been happening. The room is down to the studs now, and hubby is slowly (very slowly!) working on boring things like electrical and plumbing. I’m lLooking forward to getting started on the pretty stuff, like installing our beautiful Virage faucets from Brizo…

This is how the bathroom looks now – it’s not pretty! But it does have a little crystal chandelier ;-)

Photography
Hubby gave me a Groupon for a photography class for Christmas. I love photography, but most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing – I just click the button and hope for the best! With al the money invested in my camera and lenses, I really want to learn how to use them properly. Stuff like ISO and Aperture are a total mystery to me.

So that’s a little rundown of things I’ll be up to in 2013. What are your plans for the year?