Guest Blogger- Peacock Wall Art

Hello everyone! This is the first of 2 posts by my sister, who will be guest blogging here for the next 2 days!

So I think I'm "guest blogging" on my sister's blog. I'm not cool enough to have a blog of my own, so I thought I'd hijack her blog. I just typed some form of the word "blog" 5 times in 3 sentences. Too much?....I think so.
Anywho, what I'll be blogging (#6...heehee) about, is the wall art I have made for my soon-to-be baby girls room. I searched online for all sorts of ideas to decorate the walls in the baby's room with, and decided I wanted to make the art myself. I am somewhat crafty like my sister, but in a different sense....you see, I do more paper crafts like scrapbooking and card making. I didn't want the baby's room to be too "theme-y" (move over Winnie the Pooh) and I found some inspiration in an art print online of a peacock, and thought "I can make that" (The online inspiration was just a copied print, mine is more 3 dimensional). So, what follows, is the making of Mrs. Peacock (did she kill someone in the foyer with a candlestick?).


I bought an 18x24 inch painting canvas, yard of fabric for the background, fat quarter fabric in green for the peacock's body, interfacing (I think?), Amy Butler coordinating cardstock pack and Amy Butler fabric covered brads that matched the design and colors of the cardstock pack. Once home, I ironed a piece of the green fabric to a piece of the interface. This was to make the fabric more stiff, less flimsy, so I could trace and cut out the peacocks body (all you sewing gals are laughing at my sewing speak).
I then cut out the peacocks body. Next, I made one small and one large peacock feather template using the piece of cardboard that the fat quarter was wrapped around. Using this template, I cut out a bunch of small and larger feathers using the different patterned cardstock. I free handed the feather template, it was nothing special and I didn't want it to be perfect, I liked the look of it having rough edges. When I had a bunch of feathers cut out, I rearranged them around the peacocks body, trying out several different layouts until I found one I liked. There was no rhyme or reason to the way I layed out the feathers or the color pattern I ended up with. For the last row, I cut out simple long skinny rectangles and used a small hole punch to make the circles. I made the feet out of cardstock as well.




Back to the canvas - I wrapped the canvas with the brown background fabric and stapled it to the back of the canvas. I used a Xyron 250 sticker maker to attach all the peacocks parts to the brown fabric. Once I was done attaching all the parts, I took the matchine brads and put one on some of the large feathers. I poked a hole right through the paper and canvas covering using a paper piercer, and then poked the brad thru to the other side and closed it. The brads are supposed to be the "eyes" on the peacock feathers.
TaDa......she's all done.


Now, I could have used cardstock to make the peacock body too, but I liked the pattern on the green fabric.With all the leftover fabric, cardstock and brads I am going to make to smaller pieces of artwork (using 2 8x10 canvases), one will have owls sitting on a branch, the other will have birds sitting on a branch.
That's it! Hope the baby likes peacocks!