Thrifty Thursday: DIY Art

Vintage Botanical Prints and Vintage Educational Posters are alll over the Pinterest scene. Well maybe not right now...my Pinterest looks like the Holidays blew up on the screen but botanicals were all over my Pinterest and I decided I needed in on the action. At a thrifty, DIY, use what I've got price. 

I stumbled on Cavallini Wrapping Paper while in the big city over Memorial Day weekend. I'd seen it online but never had the pleasure of seeing and feeling them in person. They are fabulous quality with beautiful colors...too pretty to only wrap and rip open presents with-in my opinion. They are very reasonably priced when we are talking about using them for art, under $10!

So I picked a couple out. A garden print for the dining room and a Periodic Table of Elements for Jerrels office. I knew just what I was going to do with them. 

From what I understand vintage botanicals can be hard to get your hands on and come at a high price. They were used as teaching materials and now...everybody's gotta have them. So I wanted to mimic look. I had a couple dowels hanging around my craft closet from another project I didn't end up doing..oops. I had really large dowels and pretty small dowels I picked the smaller size and had my handy husband cut the dowels to the width of the paper plus 2 inches, for some wood on the ends of the paper. 

Then I snagged some stain from my parents and stained my dowels. 

I'm serious this project couldn't be any easier. 

Eye hooks have recently become my best friend. I had these little babies from another project as well and screwed them in the center end of my dowels. Next I hot glued the edge of the paper to my dowel. You could staple or superglue too. But my hot glue gun is my favorite tool. 

While hot gluing I would do a bead of glue and then "roll" into it with my dowel. I felt this gave it a more natural look. Not like I just hot glued a dowel on a piece of paper. It looked more like a scroll, I thought. Or I just told myself that to make me feel all warm and fuzzy. 

Next I decided on some string. I've got a lot of this kind of stuff around and I decided on some simple hemp cord that I had from Millie's birthday. It really seemed to fit with style of this project. I simply threaded the string through my eye hooks, tied it fairly tight, double knotted, and trimmed my ends. 

Finished. 

See! So easy and so pretty! All said and done, I would probably like a size or two larger dowels but these work. I had three pieces of art hanging in this spot and I was hankering for something simpler. This is just the ticket. Clean and simple. Because if you look below this pretty piece...to you know... where the toddler reigns...it's not so clean and it's not so simple. 

There you have it. A DIY, Thrifty, use what ya got when ya got it art piece. All in cost? $7. Cavallini has so many pretty prints...I've got my eye on the chickens, the bees, the fruits and veggies, all the butterflies, the bird nests. Basically all of them and basically I have a problem.

Blessings!