DIY Deck of Cards Wall Art

What I Made Today - Bathroom Reveal Part 2

You may have seen my earlier post on how to wallpaper using book pages here. I love the little feature wall in our downstairs bathroom now but wanted to make some artwork to accompany it. I had picked up this little pack of herb playing cards in the local charity shop because the botanical theme matched the book of wild flowers I used to paper so perfectly, but I wasn't sure how I was going to use the cards for a while. This is what I came up with!

If you'd like to make your own artwork using an illustrated deck of cards, here is a super easy tutorial...

What you will need

A pack of cards

A box frame

Small sticky foam pads

Paint or wood stain, paintbrush (optional)

Backing paper and double-sided tape (optional)

Method

I began by selecting the suite I wanted from the pack of cards - I considered mixing them up but felt it might look a little messy, so went for the hearts. I then laid them out on the box frame and decided how to arrange them.

My box frame (12x12") was £6.50 from Wilkos and is square, but I did have to leave the Ace card out because of this - if you buy a portrait frame you could include the Ace on a row of its own.

I next took the box frame apart and painted it. I wanted a darker colour to frame the white playing cards and so I used a tester pot of Cuprinol exterior wood stain in 'Wild Thyme' that I had lurking in the shed - and was quite pleased with how it turned out. I'm a big believer in making use of whatever is available in the shed!

If you are unsure what colour to paint your frame, I would suggest picking a colour out of the card illustrations. Or you can't go far wrong with buying a black frame!

Remember to paint all the parts of the box frame that you will see when it is reassembled, like this spacer section that fits between the glass and the back of the frame.

While the frame dries, you can start to stick the cards to the back of the box frame. I decided to leave the back of my frame unfinished, as the brown colour worked well with the dark green in my botanical theme. If you want to cover your board, however, now is the time to fix your backing paper to it - I suggest using double-sided tape around the outside edges for a clean finish.

Tip: check you have the frame's hanger in the right place before you start sticking cards down!

Spot the not-so-deliberate mistake!

To fix the cards, I used small sticky foam pads, as seen in the pic. I got these from Hobbycraft but most stationers' or large supermarkets stock them. The foam pads give each card a drop shadow, and means they stand in relief from the back of the frame. I love the extra interest this creates. 

If you are just wanting to place your cards flush(!) against the backing then you could use a normal frame instead, as the extra space a box frame gives you would not be necessary.

When your cards are fixed on and your box frame paint is dry, reassemble the frame and voila! Your playing card artwork is complete.

I felt a bit sorry for the Ace card being left out and so made him a frame of his own! I painted the backboard to this small frame the same colour as the box frame to tie in the colours.

must. buy. a. good. camera.

Now I just need to hang it along with a few other pieces!

Geometric Patchwork Inspiration

Five(ish) of the Best Ideas for Graphic Patchwork Projects

I posted a few weeks ago about minimalist patchwork quilts and the simplistic lines and limited colour palettes that appealed to me. Having said that I don't do much patchwork, I now keep seeing patchwork inspiration everywhere! Sometimes in the unlikeliest of places!

Here is a round-up of five six of the best - which would you most like to see turned into a quilt or patchwork project? Check out my Pinterest board Geometric Patchwork Ideas for more inspo!

Please click on the pictures to follow to the source.

This art print by Niki Singletary would make a fantastic hand pieced hexagon quilt for a double bed. I love the random cascade feel in the limited colour palette.

I actually thought this art piece from Contemporary Art Daily was a minimalist patchwork quilt until I looked closely. Perhaps not for everyone but I love the simplicity.

This art print, 'cubic cube one' by Julia Kaiser would take some careful choosing of solids to recreate (or perhaps dying fabric yourself) but I love the bold shape and use of the traditional tumbling blocks pattern in a modern form.

This colourful geometric cushion cover for Etsy is beautiful in its soft tones and subtlety, juxtaposed against the straight lines and bold shapes. It would be easier to buy it than recreate it in patchwork! But it's great inspiration for gem-based shapes and patchwork.

This poster by German graphic designer Hans Beer would work well with marbled fabrics - perhaps starting with grey and white and dying the rest then working from strips.

This Westminster Records sleeve design for Gloria by Vivaldi is striking in its modernity, considering the subject. A great cushion cover in little squares - I am quite tempted to try this out as a project. I suspect my 5 month old would love the primary colours too!

What have you seen that has given your inspiration for a project recently? What's the strangest thing that has sparked an idea for a craft project - pavement slabs? A cloud formation? Pattern and colours surround us everyday, perhaps the trick is in how we look at the world.

DIY Wallpapering with Book Pages

What I Made Today - Bathroom Reveal Part 1

We have a downstairs loo off our utility room - very handy but not very pretty. It's a small window-less white box, which needed a bit of an update. I've had a bit of a thing for vintage botanical prints and repro wallpapers for a while, and was looking out for one I loved enough to buy to use in there, then realised I could do it myself!

There are some fantastic wallpapers out there, but if you are on a budget or fancy doing it yourself, here is my 'how to' wallpaper using book pages. 

What you will need

• A book of your choice - be it colour, illustrated, sepia or simply text.
• A paper guillotine, or craft knife and ruler, or pair of scissors!
• Wallpaper paste
• A wallpaper brush, or a large paintbrush
• A firm clean paintbrush
• Plumb-line (optional)
• A damp cloth

Method

Start by ripping the spine and cover off your book, or by pulling out the signatures. I picked up my book from an antiques centre for a couple of quid - try charity shops, car boots or eBay for similar.

Once you've done this you may have bits of glue or binding thread attached to the edge of your pages, so it's a good idea to trim the edges so that you have a neat finish and so that all the pages are a uniform size for when you are papering.

This is where a paper guilottine comes in handy. If you don't have one, a craft knife and ruler will work well, or failing that a pair of scissors and a steady hand! Try to cut through as many pages as possible at one time.

Now you are ready to start papering! The handy thing about small book pages is that you don't need a large wallpapering table, a small work surface will do. Using your wallpaper or large paint brush, apply a layer of wallpaper paste to the back of several book pages. It's a good idea to leave the paper for a few minutes to let the paste soak in, so do a couple at a time - but don't leave them so long that the paste starts to dry out.

Now start applying the pages to your wall. I began in the top-left corner of my wall and didn't use a plumbline - I placed them by eye - but you could use one for increased accuracy. If you don't have a plumbline, tying a key or something with a bit of weight to a length of string will work just as well. Place the first page against the wall, pressing it lightly with your hands. Now take your dry, clean firm brush and, starting from the middle of the page, sweep it towards the edges of the book page. Your aim is to fix the page to the wall without any big lumps of paste or air bubbles.

I overlapped my book pages ever so slightly - just by a few millimeters - to give me some room for movement and error, but a mismatched higgldy piggldy look could also look fab if you want to lay your pages over each other in a more exaggerated way.

You may get little bits of wallpaper paste seeping out the edge of your book pages - use your slightly damp cloth to wipe it off while it's still damp - when it dries it will leave a shiny mark and will be much harder to remove.

Carry on pasting and papering your wall until you have covered your desired area - if you come to the other end or the bottom of your wall and the pages overlap, use your craft knife and ruler to trim the excess.

The bathroom is small so this is the furthest away I can get to take a photo of the whole wall!

Next I am planning to make some artwork for the other walls to carry on the botanical print theme - watch out for the tutorial for this pack of cards artwork in the next part of the bathroom reveal!

Five of The Best Teacup Favours

Five ways to fill your Vintage Teacup Favours

If you liked my Teacup Favour tutorial here, but don't want to use sweets, here are some other ideas for what you could fill your teacups with.

Planning a vintage wedding? Check out my Pinterest Board here for more inspiration, and watch this space for a DIY Doily Wedding Invite Tutorial.

Use your teacup as a mini terrarium!
Plant with succulents and moss for a gift that will keep giving after your big day.

Turn your teacup into a candle!
If you don't fancy the time-consuming business of making all your candles, you could simply pop in a tea light or votive.

Fill your teacup with loose sweets.
This saves you the hassle of wrapping the sweets but you would have to fill them at the venue, and it would be a little harder for guests to transport!

Add a personalised teabag and let your guests use the vintage lovelies as they were originally intended!
The teabag tag can also double up as a save the date or place name.

Fill it with a posy of beautiful flowers!
Wet a small piece of Oasis and place in the bottom. This is a beautiful look but requires making the morning of the wedding or the day before if you want them to still look fresh!

What did you use as favours at your wedding? Did you make them yourself? Let me know if you have any other ideas of ways to fill a favour teacup!

DIY Vintage Teacup Wedding Favour

A Tutorial from my own Vintage-Inspired Wedding

I'm quite excited to write a tutorial based on my own wedding, as it's an excuse to look back over all the photographs and re-live the planning and the day itself. So here we go ... here is how to make your own favours from vintage teacups! 

House of Newns Vintage Teacup Favours // Adam Drake Photography

There are so many options for favours at weddings, and if you have chosen to make them yourself the possibilities for personalisation are endless. I chose to give teacups filled with sweets to all the women at our wedding. If you would like to do the same, here is what you need.

If you fancy filling your teacups with something other than sweets, check out my post on Five of the Best Vintage Teacups here.

What You Will Need

• Teacups! I sourced mine in sets of six or so from eBay and family. You could also try thrift and charity shops. Steer clear of general auctions and well know potteries if you are trying to keep costs down!
• Sweets I bought mine from Macro in large tubs. Amazon and Hobbycraft also sell sweets in bulk but they are a little more expensive to buy this way rather than from a cash and carry. We went for sherbet lemons, strawberries and cream, and rosy apples.
• Cellophane I bought a roll of 50cm x 20m cellophane in the florists' seciton of Hobbycraft. I used plain but you can get it with little patterns and designs on too!
• Florists' Wire Again I got this from Hobbycraft - I bought the Oasis (brand) bobbin of wire rather than the packs of individual wires and had more than enough
• Small sticky foam pads - Hobbycraft again but most stationers' will sell these
• Strong scissors
• Luggage tags (optional)
• A team of bridesmaids or helpers!

My place setting on the day - spot the teacup top left! // Adam Drake Photography

Method

Once you have chosen your teacups and decided if you want them matching or if you are going to mix and match the cups and saucers (I did a combo of both) you might want to give them all a wipe or clean - though as you have the cellophane this is optional!

Mix and match teacups and saucers for a more shabby chic look

Next, I would recommend securing the teacup to the saucer. I used 3-4 small foam pads on the bottom of each cup. This will help you transport them and allow people to take them home without breaking them!

Some of the 50+ teacups I sourced - one for each woman guest!

Now you need to wrap your sweets ready to go into the teacups. Measure your teacups first to gauge roughly how many sweets you will need - I think we used 6-7 of large boiled sweets.

Cut squares of cellophane and place the sweets in the middle, then gather together the four corners and twist the sweets from the bottom. Now tie a length of the florists' wire around the top of the sweets, leaving the corners free to spread out a little, as seen here. it's not a precise science so don't worry to much if some look a little more unruly than others!

House of Newns Vintage Teacup Favour // Adam Drake Photography

This is where the bridal party comes in handy! I had a favour-making evening at my house and each person had a different job. Eg: One person stuck the saucers to the cups; one person cut the cellophane squares; one cut the lengths of wire; one measured the sweets into the cellophane then twisted and tied them etc. We had Prosecco and bellinis and it was great fun! (Mother-in-laws are optional.)

Once all your teacups have their sweets, you may also want to tie luggage tags to the teacups to double them up as place settings. I hand wrote mine but stenciling or stamping looks great too.

The table displays with mis-matched teacups favours - the night before hence no flowers!

And voila! You have some beautiful and personal gifts for your guests. My only other tip would be to write 'take me home' on the tag too - some of my guests didn't realise they could take the teacups as well as the sweets so my bridesmaids had to go round the tables telling everyone!

Here are a few pics from my wedding ... just because!

House of Newns // Adam Drake Photography

Five Of The Best Map Walls

Or, Proof That It's Acceptable To Use Maps In Every Room in Your House

If you saw my earlier post about DIY Printable Map Artwork here, you will have seen that I have a thing about using maps, on everything. I would probably use them in every room if it wasn't for that annoying nagging feeling that that would be overkill ...

But if you would like to transform your house into a gallery of cartography here is a run down of five of the best map walls!

Click on the pics to follow through to the source.

Living Room - pair with a vintage Chesterfield and battered old trunk-cum-coffee table for a shabby chic travel look

Dining Room - draw out one of the map's colours in a bright pop, like this table, and team with old school chairs for a fun and retro feel that takes you back to the classroom

Office - use local area maps in a limited colour palette for a more sophisticated feel. The layering of the pages of this map create a blueprint look that echoes architectural drawings and creates a professional, fresh vibe

Children's Room - Use a country or state- specific map to give bigger blocks of colour. The colours and straight, graphic lines from the map are repeated in the floor and upholstery coverings, making it the perfect bold and inspirational space for a child

Bedroom - the sepia vintage city map provides a monochrome colour palette that is repeated in the natural woods and soft white lines of this bedroom, creating a relaxing and sophisticated boutique hotel feel

All in all, proof that maps can be used in any room, to create a whole range of moods and looks. How have you styled your map wall?

DIY Printable Map Wall Art

The Meandering Mississippi 

You may not know this yet based on this blog, but I have a slight obsession with maps. This is slightly ironic as I have a terrible sense of direction and an only-just-acceptable understanding of geography, but I love maps to look at. Something about the level of detail, use of text and a pretty, easy-to-read colour palette really draws me in. My dad is your typical, original map lover - they help him navigate and understand the world - and I think he finds my use of maps around my home quite amusing...

Just a few things that stayed still for too long and got covered in maps in my home...

Anyway, if you are reading this the chances are you have at the very least a small appreciation of the way I feel, and so here is how you can create your own map art for the home with minimal effort!

The meandering Mississippi makes for beautiful DIY artwork 

You Will Need

• Access to a computer
• Frame(s) of your choice

That's it!

Method

To begin, you will need to select the map artwork you would like to print. 

The artwork I chose was frames 1-3 of a stunning vintage 22-frame series of maps of the Mississippi River and the courses it has taken over it's long, long history. Each colour on the map represents the route the river took at that given period in time. Beautiful, huh? I came across this map on Pinterest (of course) and if you follow this link to Visual News you too can download and use this map from the ERDC.

See how the plates line up? Mine are hung portrait next to each other due to space, but hanging them portrait one above the other, or landscape next to each other, will give you a stunning display.

After downloading the zip file and choosing the plates I wanted (I just picked 1,2 and 3...) I then uploaded the jpgs to Photobox (other online printers are available, Snapfish, Vistaprint - whoever you prefer). I chose to print mine A3 size on gloss photo paper and then bought cheap plastic (rather than glass) frames from Wilkinsons. You could order different sizes or even create a collage and order three or more of the plates as one linked-up image.

When your prints arrive, simply frame and hang! Decorating your room around them is optional ... But you could use coloured mounts or frames in any of the colours used in the maps. Picking out one of the primary colours would make this look great in a kid's room, or they could look stunning against a slate grey office wall for a more masculine look.

This DIY cost around £30 in total - bargain!

Using different artwork

If you would like to use a different map, there are some other free printable maps suggested over at Maybemej Photography, or you could do a search on Pinterest or Google.

Maybemej free collage sheet of maps

The two main things to bear in mind when choosing your map(s) are Size and Copyright.

Unfortunately, you can't simply save an image displayed on a webpage onto your computer and then print it. To display an image on a webpage clearly an image's dpi (dots per inch) only needs to be very low, around 70dpi, but to print an image clearly the dpi needs to be at least 266. So any image you lift from a website is going to be too small to print from (not to mention likely a copyright infringement). What you need to look for are images that you can download to your computer, like these Mississippi maps, as they are going to be a much larger file size to then print from. As a very broad rule of thumb, I would steer clear of any image that is less than 1MB. 

Copyright isn't something to worry too much about if you are only intending to hang the maps on you own walls, and if someone is offering a map as a free printable then it's highly likely they own or have cleared the copyright so you don't need to worry. If in doubt, ask the website owner as, clearly, you don't want to be ripping off someone's work. 

Send me a pic of how the maps look in your home!

Take a look at other ways to decorate your home using maps in my other blog post here, and on my Pinterest page 'Travel Room' here.