It's been a busy, busy place around our home the last several weeks. Indoor soccer finally came to an end last weekend, while church choir is picking back up full-swing and it won't be long before baseball and softball practices begin!
But we've been doing plenty of non-sports activities around the house, too. Have a look at some of our projects.
The first one is part of our great room remodel project that is sort of ongoing. Taking out the fireplace gave us this huge wall, and we've been contemplating how to fill it. We started with this dominant double canvas art work that ties in the ceiling beam color-wise. We want the things on this wall to represent what's important to us as a family -- those things that all four of us love. Well, we all love books, the outdoors, God, the Cardinals. So we've got our "tree of life" that is actually the tree from our field that I photographed. I bumped up the contrast on the image and knocked off all the tiny branches in Photoshop.
We decoupaged pages from books onto two canvases of the same width. Harry Potter pages, because that's a favorite. And then I found an old devotion book with prayers and poems of faith in a resale shop. We rounded it out with another old book that had extra crusty, yellowed pages to give the wall some texture and "pop."
And then I had a brilliant idea -- most of mine are, right? Anyhow, we had an old coffee table in the garage. Dan stripped it and painted it black to match our end tables and then we decoupaged the same types of pages in the middle.
Here's a closeup of the tree canvases before they were hung. Printing out the tree on individual sheets of paper and wrapping it around the edge of the canvas was a bit harder than I thought I would be. Especially when I lost a piece and had to go back and crop out that section again. We still want to put a bird on a branch -- a Cardinal bird, of course. But Abby insists it has to be a Cardinal I've photographed so that the piece is 100 percent original. She's a stickler! Next up: filling in the space around this artwork. I'm envisioning favorite family scriptures artistically represented with -- maybe -- one family photo. We have plenty of photographs all over this room, so I don't want to overdo it on photos! What I love about this wall is that it will represent art we made and things that are important to us.
Today we've got Boy Scouts Pinewood Derby all day. Here's Ryker's car when it was still a work in progress. It turned out very cool looking! And just wait until you see Abby's -- completely envisioned by her!
I liked this photo, so I had to share! She thinks her eyes are green, but here in front of these bleachers, I think it's quite obvious they're blue!
Ryker's made shot at the last basketball game.
He played most of the game (they only had six players) but sat out when his leg "hurt." We were chuckling when we saw him looking all cute and cross-legged on the bench. My baby. Getting a little misty-eyed here, so moving on....
Ryker bringing the ball down the court. We think he's amazing. Yep.
I'm so excited about this, though the notebook seems to be missing at the moment. Abby has picked up where the Harry Potter series left off and is writing her own epilogue novel. And...it's amazing! We thought she was copying something when we picked up the notebook and read it. Then we watched her scratch out two full pages at Ryker's basketball game and knew it was all her. She even explained her creative process -- amazing! When/if we find the notebook, we're going to let her start her blog. I'll type it in for her since she's not very fast at typing. Please send her lots of encouragement so she'll finish it.
As she read it to us, her toes were wiggling like wild. She gets that from her mema (and maybe her ADHD). Her toes NEVER stop moving. :)
Here's Ryker reading an equally awesome story that encompasses little monsters, windshield wipers, and me threatening him with death while pointing an umbrella at him (this is fiction, folks, I swear. we don't own umbrellas!).
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