Botanical Bliss…

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I’ve been really focused on finishing our living/dining room lately.  Here’s some of the projects I’ve done over the last few months…

Made my own plate hangers

My lovely new-to me curbside buffet

A moss wreath to pretty-up a mirror

and

Easy, cheap wall plaques

It’s so fun to see this room transform.

After hanging my wall plaques over my buffet I still felt like there was too much empty space on either side.  See…

A few months ago I came across this GREAT website with free botanical prints.

I picked out some prints I liked, but they were in color… I wanted to do black & white.

I saved the picture & then used my Photoshop Elements to change them to black & white.  If you don’t have Elements or something capable of changing your photo to black & white, you can always download Picasa.  Picasa is a great, free photo editing software.

So after I had all my photos changed to black & white I opened Microsoft Word.  Now I’m sure I could have done the next step in Elements, but I already knew how in Word ~ so I went with the quicker (no need to learn) method.

So you open a blank document in Word.  Then go to Insert.  Click on Picture.  Then From File.  Then find your picture file, select it & click Insert.

Your picture should be in your Word document now.  The next step is to resize the picture to fit your frame.  For my frame collection I used three 5×7 and two 4×6 frames.

To change the size you put your mouse over the image and right-click.  Click on Format Picture.  Then click the Size tab.  Here you’ll change to the correct size by clicking the arrows till the image size will fit within your frame.

While at Dollar Tree yesterday I came across this 8×10 photo paper…

You get 8 sheets for $1.  I took the resized botanicals and printed them on photo paper; then I cut them down to fit the frame.

Here’s the frames before they were sprayed with 97 cent black spray paint and 2 coats of Krylon Satin Black spray paint.

And here they are in all their glorious bliss on my living/dining room wall…

&

Here’s a closer view of one of them…

Here’s what the wall is looking like now.  Don’t worry… I’m putting something on the other side…

I can’t wait to finish it.

Update… I’m sharing this at It’s So Sheri’s ~ It’s So Creative Party!