a million tiny little things: Nesting

I'm definitely nesting these days. It's so cliche, but it's funny how a pregnant woman just can't help herself at this stage. I took the picture above at 30 weeks. The little girl is moving around a lot, making my lower back sore by the end of the day and giving me insomnia between 4-6 am. All in all it's going well. Well, besides the fact that my hair looks like a mane. My word, I think my hair is using this picture to beg me for a haircut. It's working.

Anyway, I've been working on the kids' rooms during the last couple of weekends. For the nursery I feel inspired by poppies and the color combination coral, orange and yellow. I'm excited.

A couple of weeks ago I made this painting for her room.

I was inspired by a blog I found recently called Shanty 2 Chic. These ladies use power tools like no one's business and build everything under the sun - at least it seems like it. I'm totally inspired and I couldn't help picking up the circular saw, hammer and electric sander to put this together.

Jesse was amused to find his 7 month pregnant wife in the garage with the circular saw. I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Don't worry . . . I watched a couple of you tube videos about how to use it and I read the manual from front to back before I picked it up. That's enough preparation to prevent me from cutting off any extremities, right?

Anyway, I found this picture in a google images search and thought it would be fun to recreate it. (I can't seem to find it again to link to the source.)

Then, I found this wall hanging and decided I would build one similar to act as my canvas. So, I bought my supplies, cut the wood, pieced them together, painted them and then I was ready to draw and paint.

I used the "grid" technique that we learned in jr. high to draw the image large enough for my canvas. I had to add a couple more flowers to change it from a portrait to a landscape image. Once I was finished I taped it to the wood and traced over it.

The tracings made indentations in the wood so I could see where to apply my paint. I just used some cheap acrylics I had on hand to fill it in. I forgot how fun it was to paint. It's been so long since I've pulled out the paintbrushes to do anything beyond freezer paper painting.