A few weeks ago, my husband and I found a charming watercolor pineapple piece from a local Arizona artist. I knew instantly that I had to have it.
The question was, what shall we do with it?
While staring into my newly organized drawer of scrapbook paper, I was struck with inspiration. Naturally, it meant pulling out my trusty Cricut.
Palm fronds! A pineapple this adorable needs to be surrounded by palm fronds!
Originally, I wanted to match the paper for the palm fronds perfectly with the greens in the watercolor. However, as in nature, variety is the spice of life and we do what we can with what we have. I have quite a stack of green paper, so while not perfectly containing a grey undertone, I found vibrant colors that spoke to me.
I purchased four 9″ x 9″ frames at IKEA to complete the gallery of tropical love. Using the Cricut Design Space, I selected a preloaded design of two palm fronds crossing.
Now, if you’ve used the Cricut Design Space before you know these will cut as separate pieces because they are different colors. Perfect for my needs! However, to fill as much of my frames as possible, I had to play with the dimensions so each palm frond was at or bigger than the dimensions of the frame. I wanted the looks of the fronds falling off the edges, out of view, so a tad oversized was perfect.
Then, there’s the fun part! The Cricut machine doing all of the fun cutting!
After all my pieces were cut, now came the fun part of styling each frame. I cut a 9″ x 9″ white background for each frame and mapped out my game plan.
Once I was all set, instead of using spray adhesive to perfectly glue every leaf to the background I used small dabs of craft glue. I wanted the paper pop off the page but stay in place, so glue was used sparingly.
After gluing into their final destination, I trimmed the overhanging leaves to align with the background edges.
Now they were ready for framing!
I love seeing the fronds lift a little like real plants!
I was very careful to create a layout that I wanted for the wall, so once framed, I made sure to label each frames location with a little help from Batman sticky notes.
A few nails and we had a fun, tropical gallery for our guest room.
I still can’t decide if I love the color combo of the greens, but this room will be painted in the future. Maybe a new wall color and complimentary green accents will bring it all together. In the meantime, it’s an excellent start to cozy but slightly exotic guest retreat!
This blog post was not sponsored but contains links as part of an affiliate program I participate in. Meaning, if you click through and purchase, at no additional cost to you, I earn a commission. I have student loans to pay… help a sister out.
One thought