Canvas Make-Over

So this is kind of a lame DIY, but it's a little project I'm doing for work, so I thought I'd share.  I'm a school photographer for Lifetouch.  For some of our schools we offer canvas prints of building photos.  We try to only produce quality products, and we recently had a mishap with a bunch of our building photos, and our office was left with a bunch of canvas prints that were not good enough to hand over to our schools.  So I decided to use one of the bad prints for a little office project.  This is how the canvas started off.  I blurred out the school name, because it seemed like the right thing to do.  

This is how it looked after one layer of yellow spray paint.

I made sure to also get the corners and the thick edges.  

Two coats of spray paint.

Then I printed a few different sizes of two Lifetouch logos, and attached them to the canvas with Modge Podge.  At first I was coating the back, and then shellacking the front down, but they were getting too wrinkled, so I stopped doing a top coat.  We'll see if I can add a top coat when it dries, if not I might just spray a clear coat of paint over the top.  

I gotta get some sleep! Oi!  Happy DIYing, chris!

Wedding Stationary

To continue my One Year Anniversary Series here are the save the date and wedding invitations I made up for our special day.  

I made the envelopes out of scrapbook paper, which I got on sale from Michael's.  I have a DIY tutorial on how to make envelopes here, and I used a similar technique for my save the dates.  For the actual save the dates, I had previously made a bunch of post cards out of old wallpaper and 4x5 index cards, and they were just sitting in a box, so I used them for our wedding.  It was great to save money here.  We spent more on postage for these than on the actual save the dates!  To customize the cards I printed our save the date message on them, and then modge podged some tissue flowers from vintage napkins I'd been saving.  

To write the recipients' name and addresses on the front, I carefully placed blank address labels, and then hand addressed them all.  I loved finding a purpose for the 4x5 postcards I made.  This was the perfect match, because I received this paper during our summer at Idyllwild from my friend Rachel.  She had to clean out the painting teacher's supply closet, and there was a slew of wallpaper sample books from the 70's.  She gave me some, and I was thrilled.  I cherish vintage paper.  

For our wedding invites we used two different packaged DIY invites from Michael's wedding selection.  I loved the colors and design of both of these.  They were simple to use, and on sale!  I'm glad I went this route for my invites.  I think if I tried more of a handmade approach than these, I would have spent even more money and time on these then I did.  I'm certain there are not cheaper options as far as store bought goes.  Weddings are so expensive, and I didn't see the need to spend a ton of money on something most people will throw away.  Sure the invites set the mood for the wedding, but there is no need to spend hundreds of dollars on all the wedding stationary.  Most people will barely remember what the invites looked like by the date of the wedding anyway!  

That's all for today.  Hope ya'll enjoyed, happy DIYing, chris!