Adventure Awaits!

Our living room recently received an upgrade, in the form of some new art. I found a couple of prints on Etsy that I loved, from Andrea Lauren's store Paper-Sparrow (I highly recommend checking out her shop - she has tons of super cute prints! I'm still eyeing the "Bear's Bouree" print, so I might need to make that one mine at some point as well. Who doesn't love a banjo-playing, suspender-wearing bear?! I mean really). So anyways, two prints in particular caught my eye big time, so I made them ours and decided they belonged in our living room.  We had been living with just a simple wrought iron piece on the wall in there, so it was nice to add a little somethin' somethin'.

There's a before shot for y'all (which reminds me, yet again, I have yet to show the full on before-after pics of the living room! I'll get around to that someday...)

And, with our new additions!

Some close up shots for ya, to really see the beauty of the prints (sorry about the glare in the second one!) I love that they fill in that wall a little bit more, and the colors in both prints just so happen to coordinate PERFECTLY with the colors in the living room/kitchen (I don't have a shot that shows this, but the blue mountains are almost the exact color of the kitchen/living room accent wall - and the pops of red in the print on the right add to the ever developing red theme we have started, and that I have mentioned here, here, and here).  Not to mention, we love the sentiment and they fit in with our outdoor-loving-selves very nicely.

As far as how I framed them, that was a minor adventure. These prints are a very unique size, at 11x17, and I quickly learned that this is not a standard size for frames to come in. I really didn't want to have to shell out big bucks for custom frames, but luckily my typically uncreative brain had an outside-the-box moment and I found a solution! The frames you see were actually marketed as being meant for three 3x5 pictures.  Well I luckily was able to break the boundaries of frame marketing and realized that these were just the right size for my new prints! The only thing making them "meant" for 3x5 photos were three small stock photos shoved in there. Take those out, it's just one big frame. And perfect that there was no backing or anything, so I didn't have to worry about a mat or anything.  Oh, and while the size of the frames was perfect, they actually started out black, so I showered them in some Oil Rubbed Bronze spray paint and kaplow! They now coordinate perfectly.

So there you have it. Our living room is slowly becoming more swell every day.

OOPS COUNT: One big oops, and may we take this opportunity to have a moment of silence for one of the original frames I bought that committed suicide by swan-diving off the wall when no one was home, resulting in fatal injuries. Which leads us to..

Lesson Learned: Sticking and re-sticking adhesive strips in order to ensure that a frame is in the right location will definitely compromise the stickiness of said adhesive strips, and will lead to your frame falling into a clinical depression and eventually taking it's own life. Measure twice, stick once.