This one was actually inspired by something I saw on Pinterest, but I went in another direction with mine:
My finished piece
The original inspiration piece on Pinterest
I had wanted to recreate the above piece at my baby shower, but I ended up with an idea I liked better (which I'll share with you soon!) and decided to just do a piece with plain balloons. I went with a mint color palette. The nursery colors so far are soft gray, white, mint green and little touches of gold.
Here's what you'll need to recreate this piece:
- Scissors
- Glue stick
- White poster board
- 3 sheets of scrapbooking paper (feel free to use any color or print combos you love---mine are from Michael's Arts & Crafts)
- Twine string, ribbon or yarn
- Pencil
- IKEA Ribba Frame (the large size)
Step one is to trace a balloon shape onto a piece of poster board and cut it out. I freehanded mine until I got the size and shape I wanted. Then, I traced and cut out 10 balloons of the light mint and medium mint colors and five of the darker teal color. I didn't end up using all of the balloons I cut out but it was nice to have extras.
Once you have all of your balloons cut out, you'll want to take your large piece of poster board (I got mine at a local Kroger but you can get them pretty much anywhere) and cut a piece out that fits behind the matting of the IKEA Ribba frame. Then, from the backside, tape the poster board into place so you can get to work!
The most frustrating part of this project was placing the balloons and string. First, I laid out the balloons and arranged them into a pattern I liked. Then, I glued the balloons in place, one by one---you'll see in my final piece above that I layered some of them.
Finally, I cut random pieces of twine string that I got at Michael's Arts & Crafts and tried to affix the strings with glue underneath the balloons. I couldn't find my glue gun---but if you have one, I would use hot glue to place the strings because it is hard to get them to stay put, especially since they have a natural curl to them. You could also use ribbon or yarn and make your life a lot easier---but I loved the look of the twine.
Once I had the strings in place (I used my iPhone as a weight to hold the bottoms of the strings down), I tied a twine bow around the strings. Then, I spent some time getting the actual piece into the frame and making sure the strings laid nicely. The glass of the frame kind of pushed them down and it all worked out. It's kind of trial and error with this one.
Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out---now I just need to figure out where to hang it. I'm kind of in a place right now where I'm realizing that I have way too much gold art for the nursery (not hung yet, thankfully). I need to eliminate some of those pieces and add in some more neutral pieces to balance things out. I LOVE gold prints, but it was just getting to be a little much. The best part is that some of the gold prints I was going to use in the nursery were actually originally intended for other rooms in our home, so I'm going to hang them elsewhere. Thank goodness we still have nearly six weeks left to add all of the finishing touches!
Good luck if you try this one and thank you for reading :)
