Monday, July 26, 2010

Leaves Leaves Everywhere!

Well after writing my post yesterday morning Ryan was all excited to head off to Fabricland and pick up material for the leaves. Seeing as it was Sunday and Fabricland doesn't open until noon he had a LOONG wait ahead of him. So we popped in a movie and relaxed. The second it was 10 minutes to noon he hopped up and was ready to go.
Now this was Ryans first trip to Fabricland. I normally go by myself... and I now know the reason. It took about a half hour to get Ryan on the same concept idea as I was with regards to colour. I believe there were MANY leopard and zebra prints that Ryan picked out and wanted on the walls. I also had to teach him about which fabrics can be ironed on a wall and which will just melt to the wall (ie anything with lycra will melt to you walls unless very careful). We wandered around looking and were probably there for about 45 minutes to an hour. Finally we found 3 lovely materials. Two were for the leaves and the third is going to be PERFECT to recover the wonderful glider chair I purchased off Craigslist... more on that another day. These are the two materials that surprisingly Ryan found (with a little help in the colour tone category from me).

Nice and bright and although they are blue and green they are more or less gender neutral colours. If we have a girl we will add a few pink leaves to the tree as well. If its a boy it will stay the way it is. I should probably add that these two materials were chosen more based on price... they were each only $3 per metre and we only got a half a metre of each... setting us back a whopping $3 plus tax!!! WOOHOO!!!
Other than ironing the double sided webbing to the backside of the fabric I left this project up to Ryan to do. To see how to make material wall decals go here.
Ryan spent Sunday afternoon drawing a leaf pattern and then tracing it onto the 2 materials and cutting them out. I was attempting to nap at this point... but when you live with Ryan that doesn't actually happen very often!!! After dinner after Ryan had cut out all of the leaves he instantly wanted to iron them on the wall but didn't know how to do it. So together we pulled out the iron and got to work. We quickly found that the green and blue material was very thin and when you put the iron directly on the leaves the iron would be covered in the glue from the webbing. SO out came a tea towel and we just ironed the tea towel over top of the leaf which worked perfectly every time. (I should add that we were both still in our PJ's... ignore my half awake look in these pictures haahaa)
Ryan very enthusiastically ironing the leaves on the wall!!! I know you can't see it but his mouth is wide open... as it always is when he is concentrating!!
AND TAH DAH!!! The end result! We LOVE IT!!!! We decided to put a few of the extra leaves we had floating down from the tree. The best part about it is if in the future we decide to change the colour scheme those leaves are completely removable and we can always add new colours!! We are both VERY pleased with how it turned out!!!!

I will have a lot more projects this week and in the weeks to come. Including my kitchen cabinet project that will finally happen next week while I'm on vacation!!!!! YEAH!!!!!

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