I am a nerd. I grew up playing video games and I haven’t stopped even into old age (ripe old 27, I am). I also like to craft stuff and exercise the creative part of my brain. I got it into my head that I would use perler beads and make some coasters. I have pictures of all the individual coasters too, but I don’t want it to look too cluttered. I hope you see the theme, here!
I can’t stand it when there are bare walls in my living space. It makes me feel like I’m living in an insane asylum (at least the walls aren’t padded). So this summer, after I rearranged my bedroom, I decided to stretch my creative music and make a tree on my walls.
I have a sort of leafy, foliage inspired room and I wanted to keep that going in the walls, so I tooled around and found some pictures of similar decals on the internet. I found this one immediately. Then I bought some shelf paper… and basically sat on the project for a month, a little intimidated to start.
Finally, I got fed up with myself one day and decided enough is enough! I used the other tree as a reference and sketched something up really quickly, which was amazing to me since I’m not an artist in that respect. It was only supposed to serve for my reference though, so it didn’t have to be perfect. I originally was going to take some butcher paper and make a stencil, but then I said what the heck and just free-handed the design on the wall and got to cutting!
I got the trunk and the main branches on pretty quickly and was actually very happy with the result. You can’t see them, but I still did have free-handed curlicues all along
the branches to serve as smaller branches. I was a little confounded – how was I going to make these things pop?! I tried floral wire, but it was too thin and didn’t work well. I thought about it and finally decided to try pipe cleaners (chenille stems if you’re fancy). I just twisted a few together and stuck them on the wall with some clear tape and voila! A beautiful masterpiece!
I think it turned out pretty well and goes with the overall theme of my bedspread/curtains. I also ended up putting some “fairy lights” on the top, which adds a cool ambiance to my room, but unfortunately I don’t have pictures of those (yet). Next step might be to add some beaded dragonflies and butterflies to the branches, but they are turning out to be more trouble than they’re worth (I’m not a big fan of beaded work).
Lunacy and Letters 