Saturday, August 4, 2012

POTTERY BARN INSPIRED ART

When I got off work tonight I was feeling crafty.  I started looking through my Pinterest boards to see if there were any projects that I could work on, but nothing was getting my creative juices flowing.  I sorta gave up on the craft idea and wandered over to the Pottery Barn website to.  I stumbled upon these and I thought they were really cool!


A friend of mine recently finished his basement and it's uber-cool!  It's all Restoration Hardware/ Pottery Barn looking.  And yes...I think it's safe to say I'm just a tad jealous!  ;)  But really, the space is FAN-TAS-TIC! 

Sorry this is the only picture I could find and this is from months ago when it was still under construction.
Anywhooo I saw these and thought they would be a perfect addition to his space.  There was one little problem though.  The Pottery Barn art was way expensive!  Even for my best of friend I couldn't justify spending that kind of money, so I decided I would try to make it.  My version is a mixture of the two, but I think it's really cool and it cost me less than $15!

I started out by painting shims in five different colors.





I had to do a little customer paint mixing on a couple of the colors.  The red and the yellow that I had purchased were just a little too bright for the look I was going for.  

Once I painted all the shims. I laid them out on my plywood.  I tried to lay them randomly - without putting too much thought into it so I didn't end up with any sort of color pattern.





Once I was happy with how everything looked, I went outside to start putting the frame around my plywood.  I bought an eight foot piece of outside corner trim and used construction adhesive to attach it to my plywood.





I decided the stain the whole thing a dark walnut.  The shims aren't perfect so I knew the plywood would show through in certain places.


Then I got a little crazy with the construction adhesive.  Hehe :)  I figure if a little is good than a lot is better and I didn't want anything to fall off!


Then all I had to do was lay my shims down.  Easy as pie!  

I wanted to tone down the paint colors just a bit so I wiped a little dark walnut stain over everything.


I love the dimension the of the shims!




And here it is-  all finished.  I can't wait to see it in his basement!  I think it's going to look great.


I know my version is quite a bit different than Pottery Barn's but I love it just the same.  :)

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