I love to look at pictures of fireplaces on Pinterest to gather mantel ideas. I thought it might be fun to start sharing different mantels that I put together. I currently have the following up on our mantel...filled with easy Easter decorations. Most of the pieces came from the thrift store {with a bit of cleaning up and tweaking}
I was inspired by two sweet friends in blogland on two of the pieces. The first is the bunny canvas. I followed the tutorial from Jenn over at
Clean & Scentsible. The only thing I did differently was to cut my actual bunny from the template that Holly shared over at her
Bunny Banner tutorial on 504 Main. I'm really getting a bunch of use out of that template, Holly. Thanks for posting it! {As you can see, the template on the canvas matches the bunnies on the banner...which is a
free printable from last Friday.
You can download it here. Again, thanks to
Holly for the bunny design.}
I'm really happy with how it all came together. Annnnd...we took down our large family portrait. We had our Bible class over recently and not one but two people commented on how many photos we had up of our family in our home {and I haven't even hung my gallery wall yet!}. I felt a bit vain and wanted to go around taking a lot of them down. Apparently, we like to look at ourselves a lot. Well, I didn't take all of them down. But the fireplace shrine to ourselves was revamped to have a more...non-look-at-us motif.
--
While the bunny canvas was an idea from Jenn...the actual canvas came from Goodwill.
And my Easter Egg Topiary was from the tutorial I posted last spring:
here.
The window frame came from a thrift store...about 15 years ago. As you can see, it had been broken in a previous move. And my 8-year-old was so sick of the ABCs that I painted when he was two. I mean,
really sick of them.
So I, errrr,
carefully, removed the glass from the frame. I didn't do anything crazy like take my hammer and smash the glass to pieces to get out some pent up frustration. No. No sane person would
ever do that. Or completely delight in the process.
Again, after I
carefully removed the glass, I slapped on some of my {in}famous "Oops" blue paint and gave it a good sanding to rough it up. {You can see other places I used "Oops" blue paint
here,
here and
here, among
many other places in our home. It's a bit much, really. But, then again, so am I.}.
There's the Goodwill canvas I used for
Jenn's Bunny Canvas. I only paid $1 for it {woot, woot}! I covered it with Behr's Perfect Taupe...only because I was painting the laundry room at the time and had a paintbrush and tray full of the paint.
Loving it much better than the previous artist's piece {that *may* make me a bad person to say that...someone's kid probably made that. Although they then turned around and gave it to Goodwill, so Pot, meet Kettle}.
All of the little bunny friends also came from Goodwill. I scored a basket o' bunnies last year at Goodwill for super cheap. There were an insane amount of little ceramic bunnies in it...although half of them turned out to be salt and pepper shakers. That just means there's lots of bunnies on my table, too. They seem to be multiplying like...well, bunnies.
Simple and easy. And super cheap.
Neglect your chores like me and don't miss a thing:
