Hand-Painted Art for My Kitchen: "Where You Invest Your Love..."

This post has been a long time coming. This project was finished a couple weeks ago, but I was waiting to get it hung up (with the help of my husband) before posting.

As you know, I live in a little cook-cutter, white walled, baby house on an Air Force Base. Base housing is far from character-filled...in fact it is a little stark white and very un-personal. We are allowed to paint or hang stuff, but it must be returned to the state we found it in upon leaving, which being in the military, you never can be sure when that will be. Someday we will live in an old house, full of charm and character, but for today we don't. For now, I am trying to make my little baby house as homey, charming and personal as I can without investing to much into it, as it is, after all, only temporary (only probably a year or so).

We were able to purchase plenty of furniture for our house together and now I am left with the task of doing the little ("girly") tasks of decorating. I'm not a huge fan of white walls, and white walls without art are super sad. I, however, have trouble finding art that I like within our budget, so I have therefore be doing the DIY thing (which I do anyway but..).

About a month back on a weekend, my husband and I were at his shop (he works in a Civil Engineering Squadron doing Structures). They have a bin of junk wood and scraps. He was throwing some stuff in there when I spotted this...cabinet door-like thing...

I am still not sure what it was. Looks like a cabinet door, but it has 6 weird little hooks on it, and no signs of and hinges ever being there so...it's a mystery. But I liked it. It looked like it wanted to be painted on. I waited another week of it being in the scrap bin before I ..*pilfered* it for my own.

I decided on painting some of my favorite song lyrics on it. "WHERE YOU INVEST YOUR LOVE, YOU INVEST YOUR LIFE." (Mumford and Sons: Awake, My Soul). If I was the sort to get tattoos, that would already be on me somewhere, but as I am not quite that sort I figured painting it as art for my kitchen was a close substitute. I pondered getting some stencils to make the letters crisp and precise, but that is not really indicative of myself. Instead, I free handed it. I did pencil in some lines to help keep it all straight- I have an horrible inability to make straight lines without ruler guidance.

 Lyrics alone don't make a painting for me, so I bordered it in some Hungarian-inspired flowers. Hungary has some gorgeous embroidery which has always been part of decorating my family's home (my grandfather was from Hungary and one of my sisters is adopted from there), so I decided to bring some into mine.I am incapable of embroiderying such beauty, but painting it is fun.  I considered painting flowers to also mimic Polish paper art (called Wincynanki), to honor my Polish heritaged husband. But it is incredibly detailed and when I practiced on other paper my flowers looked awful in paint, so I scratched that plan and stuck with my own roots. When I finished my couple days of painting it, I sealed it with spray varnish.

I am pretty pleased with how it came out. It's unique, I think. That's probably why I like it so much. JoJo helped me get it screwed into our kitchen wall and it now is hanging over our little dinning area. Just one more little bit of homey charm to our house!

Still a little stark and sad, but getting happier! If you can't tell, I'm a fan of color. You can't see the rest of my kitchen in this photo, but all the colors present in the flowers are basically the color scheme of my kitchen. Anything with a folksy print, bright color, or vintage vibe is welcome. I suppose salvaged cabinet door wall art fits in nicely.