Family Tree Artwork

I saw this fancy family tree (The Giving Tree Family Tree) in Martha Stewart Living about a year ago and thought how nice it would be to have some family history as artwork around the house.  Art is so much more enjoyable when it is personal or has a special meaning, don't you think?



I have always been interested in genealogy, and thought this would be a creative way to go about it!  I was even more inspired after seeing a few episodes of "Who Do You Think You Are?".  Did y'all watch that show?  I love that Brooke Shields descended from royalty!  The sponsor of the show was ancestry.com, which is such an amazing site.  You can enter your family information, and things will pop up that may be links to your tree.  You can view the actual census documents from the 1800s!  And manifestos from ships full of people immigrating to America.

1850 Census Report for Louisa May Alcott:



The Unsinkable Molly Brown from the Titanic's Passport Application:



Ok - so after I researched our tree, which took a while, and some digging, (If you are a Rathgeb, German by way of Switzerland - please email me!!) I was ready to make the tree.  Martha provides the templates and makes things sound like they will be so easy, and the products so readily available!  It is not so Martha! 
Here is the list of tools and materials Martha calls for:

• Tree and label templates
• 30-by-40-inch watercolor paper, aceartsupplies.com
• Craft knife
• Cutting mat
• Gold drawing ink
• Fine-tip paintbrush (for glue, size 20)
• Black fine-tip pen (for names, size 0, by Blick Master, dickblick.com)
• Paste

Problem #1 - Ace Art Supply has never heard of 30-by-40-inch watercolor paper.  Hobby Lobby and Michael's don't have anything that size either.  But I did find a smaller size watercolor paper at HL that I thought might work.  I had it printed out on drafting paper at an office supply store to make sure it would work on the watercolor paper I found, and it would! 

Problem #2 - No one can print on large paper unless it is on a roll.  What!?  After all that, and now no one can do it!?  Minuteman Press to the rescue!  They have beautiful watercolor paper on a roll!  Brian at MP helped me out and I had my tree the next day!  I highly recommend them.

Next up - the templates for the name tags.  Now, if you work for Martha, or you ARE Martha, you probably have exemplary penmanship that you don't mind to display from now until the end of time under museum quality glass - but I do not.  In Photoshop, I layered text over Martha's template and used a great handwriting font from Kevin and Amanda (if you haven't heard of them, they have amazing fonts! And lots of other neat creative stuff on their site).  I used the font "Pea Nic Script" for my tree. 

Then I used the sheet of watercolor paper I bought and could not use for the tree, cut it up into 8.5" x 11" pieces and printed out the template tags.  I cut out the tags (with scissors instead of a craft knife) and traced around the edge with a gold paint pen (instead of a paint brush).  I made the tag with Claire's name at the base of the tree a bit larger than the others.  And I made the older generations a little smaller so I could fit more on the tree. 

I think I had the tags laid out for 2 months before I had the time and the nerve to glue them down.  I used my T-square to line things up and my scrapbook adhesive gun to glue them down.

Now how do I frame this beast!?  I did consider that before I had it printed.  I had in mind to fill a large blank wall in the powder room, so I wanted it to be sizable.  Because of the proportions of the tree, I knew that I would have to custom frame.  Any ready made frame would not have an even mat on all sides.  My first trip to Michael's for framing resulted in about a $300-$350 framing job - what!?

My high-end selections:



That was not going to fly.... back to the drawing board...

My next trip to Michael's, with a budget in hand and with the help of my friend Kathy's (who just happens to be a Michael's framer, an excellent framer at that!) artistic eye, I settled on these two choices:

And picked the top one!

After a long wait behind all of the Christmas presents being framed, I finally got the finished product!  And here it is... almost too pretty to put in a bathroom. 

Have you done any family tree projects or ancestral art? 

Linking to:
The DIY Project Parade at The DIY Showoff
Savvy HomeMade Monday at Home Savvy A to Z
Weekend Warrior Link Party at Ask Anna Moseley
Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps on the Porch
Made By You Monday at Skip to My Lou
Tuesdays at Shwin & Shwin
Tuesday Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia

Shower Curtain

In this post I talked about deciding what to do about a shower curtain in my downstairs guest bathroom, I loved this one from Ballard Designs:



but doesn't the monogram look tee-inescee?

Then I found this one from Target:

And it is similar, so I went with it, took it in hand to find a monogrammer that could give me a substantial sized letter!

And much to my dismay, no one could embroider a letter much bigger than 6-10 inches.

After seeing this post by Trisha at Sweet Survival:




Where she made a monogram out of felt for her pillows, I was hopeful that one creative sewer in my life (insert Whitney here) could help me figure it out/do it for me. Only one problem...she lives over 1,000 miles away in a land of rock and heat. Ah-ha, but she was coming my way!

When I explained the project to Whitney she let me in on the closely held secret that they sell felt by the yard, not just the cheap felt squares in the craft area - whew! That makes it a lot easier. (Did everyone else know that they sell nice felt by the yard?)

So...

• I picked out a letter in the font I liked, Renaissance, and printed it out on several pieces of paper - the letter is about 19 inches tall.
• Then I taped them all together, so they made a complete "L" template. It was much easier to tape them together exactly with Whitney's suggestion of taping them up over the window, which made the paper transparent and easy to overlap where the design lines matched up.
• I taped it onto the curtain to make sure it didn't look ridiculously large:

(Notice the drywall patching where I ripped the towel bar off the wall? Nice.)
• After taping the dickens out of the paper layers, I cut out the letter pattern.
• (We tried using Wonder Under to adhere the letter to the curtain to make it easier to sew - but the weave of the curtain prohibited stickage and did not work for us.)
• We/Whitney pinned the letter to the curtain, and she sewed and turned, and sewed and turned, and sewed and turned, and asked, "Are you sure YOU don't want to try this?". No thank you.

I LOVE how it turned out!

I really should get that iron back out, I know...

And now still trying to decide if I will paint these stripes onto the wall...

The DIY Showoff

What do you think?

Linking to:

Under the Table and Dreaming - Sunday Showcase Party
I Heart Naptime - Sundae Scoop
Petite Hermine - Sunday Linky Party
The DIY Showoff - Project Parade
Tatertots and Jello - Weekend Wrap Up Party
Dittle Dattle - Amaze Me Monday
My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia - Tuesday's Treasures
DIY by Design - Sizzle into Summer
The Blackberry Vine - Tuesday To Do

Oops! and My IKEA Find

I personally thought this was just hilarious, but the hub - not so much.

As I am looking at this sad 1991 ceramic towel bar in the hall bath, I think to myself, "Self - there might be a crack in the calk there attaching the towel bar to the wall, I wonder if I can get a knife and just cut it off the wall. Hmmm, maybe I will try a swift little tug and see what happens..." and the whole thing is suddenly in my hands! (And there are two gaping holes in the wall, all the way through to the studs!)

Towel bar on the wall:

Towel bar off the wall:

Problem of the ugly towel bar on the wall - solved.

New Problem: two gaping holes in the wall.

Me: We can do the drywall repair, no problem!

Hub: What do you mean by we?

Anyone have any dry wall repair tips?

As hard as I tugged, I could not rip remove the toilet paper holder of same design off the wall - so we still have two of those. One ugly ceramic one that you need to be a gymnast to reach while on the potty, and another pretty oil rubbed bronze one in a nice normal spot, easy to reach while seated.


On a positive note, we took a trip to IKEA yesterday with everyone else in the suburbs of Chicago, looking for a bookcase for Claire. I was hoping to find a desk and bookcase option that we could modify to look like built-ins in her room, and add a nice little window seat to boot. But no such luck. But I did come across these niffy little storage boxes that are perfect for holding all of her school papers year by year:

They were only $7.99 for a box of two. I thought I can grab a couple every once in a while until I have enough for every year of school,  PreK-12. No messy file folders like I have now, nice and organized.....ahhhh......

Oh Woe Is My Shower Curtain...

Here is my downstairs guest bath - I like the way the previous owners updated the counter with a nice granite (I think they replaced all the baths with granite remnants, none are the same, but all are pretty) and painted the cabinets.

Here it is while we were looking at the house:

(They were potty seat up people - we are potty seat down people, do you have a preference?)

Here is is after we moved in with the shower curtain from our previous house:

Now - I saw this inspirational picture of an extra-long shower curtain that Young House Love used to hide that unsightly gap between the top of the shower curtain and the shower ceiling:

 I bought that shower curtain:

and after a "Target shipped to my old address, was it really my fault, but the new owners of my old home now have some new towels and an extra long shower curtain" debaucle - it finally arrived here! It's extremely wrinkled, but it's here. And if I'm just trying it out, do I really need to iron it to get the full effect? Maybe...cause I'm NOT lovin' it!

And how hideous is that towel bar that I have trained my brain to ignore? Should we replace it with a pretty one, or totally take it out? I was planning on some monogrammed towels there, but it would only be decorative. The functional towel bar is on the back of the door.

The walls now are Gourmet Mushroom, a discontinued SW color that is a nice beigey gray that I will leave, but modify.  Here is what I have planned for the walls:

The DIY Show Off

Here is shower curtain option #2. I was thinking I might add a nice strip of patterned scrolly black and white fabric to the bottom to make it that extra long length:



Too frou frou foofy?

Any suggestions here, please!?