Eli's Room... Part 1 Artwork

Eli has been sleeping in a twin bed for a couple weeks now. He's done really well with it. We started out with the mattress on the floor, but now he's in a regular bed. His room doesn't look like a nursery anymore. The walls had been light blue with one wall that had light green stripes painted on it. My dad painted navy blue stripes over the green ones. Kevin made an upholstered headboard and matching guard rails for the bed. Those updates will be in a separate post. I still need to take some pictures of the final results.

This weekend I worked on the artwork for his room. The colors in his bedding are navy, orange, light blue, brown, and green. We decided to accent in mostly orange since his walls are now light blue and navy. The bedding is not themed, so we decided that the accessories would be transportation-themed for now. Eli is really into trucks and buses and things with wheels.

I wanted to keep everything inexpensive, but I'm not exactly the craftiest person. My mom found transportation themed peel-and-stick appliques at Hallmark. The colors were perfect, and there was quite a variety of sizes and types of vehicles.

The first part of the project was to make something for a long narrow wall next to a window. I found unfinished chalkboard frames at Ben Frankin when I was home for Christmas. They had a navy blue chalkboard finish (that I'm sure would be terrible to actually use chalk on but worked for my purpose) for $1.49 each. Later on I found two more (gray chalkboard backgrounds) at JoAnn Fabric). I painted the frames orange and green. The finished products are below, but I just finished them today and haven't hung them in his room yet.





The next project was to make something for over Eli's bed. I changed my mind about what I wanted to do about 10 times but finally decided on painting a canvas. I found one on sale for $8 and got some acrylic paint.

Here it is with the first coat.

Here's the finished product. I'm really proud of how it came out. We haven't hung this over his bed yet, but I showed it to Eli and he liked it.

I also decided to pick up these letters and paint them to match. I think I am going to put them either above or below the canvas. Just a subtle reminder.

Hopefully I'll get my act together soon and take some pictures of the entire room. We still want to put a beanbag or make the corner of the room some sort of play area after we move the glider into the twins' room. If you're wondering what kind of progress we've made in that room.... well, nothing so far. Still plenty of time, right? :)