Nursery Project: New Print

So while I'm busy doing things like snuggling the cutest baby alive and working on writing his birth story, I figured I'd share the nursery projects with you that I've been working on in the past few months to get ready for Lincoln's arrival. 

I don't pretend like I'm writing these up as I try to get spit up out of my hair, I did write them ahead of time in hopes to share them with you as I adjusted to being a mom.

I love these projects. Mostly because they're almost free and filled with love and easy. But also because I love how they came out.

So I love the old vintage National Park posters. Do you know the ones I'm talking about? Some are actually vintage and others are newer signs made to look like the old ones. Like this one of the Grand Canyon.

So I set out to find a great poster for the nursery, but soon realized that I didn't want a sign of a National Park. I wanted a sign from a peak or a lake in Colorado where we live in the summers. So I figured I'd have to make my own.

I found a picture I took from this summer of Lake San Cristobal in Lake City where we take our guests to kayak during the summer. And then I (lacking any real fancy editing software) I used Picasa and Microsoft Word to pull this off.

Here's what we started with.

So I pulled it into Picasa and used the "Posterize" effect to get what I wanted. I chose a limited number of colors and just committed to the 'cartoon' look.

Then I adjusted the colors to what I liked. I was looking for something to not look too realistic but still be beautiful like the lake truly is. I know I could have gone more beige and vintage with it, but the nursery runs on bright white so the off-whiteness of the vintage look just didn't make much sense.

I tried to figure out how to add words right there in Picasa, but I don't think they have that option (or at least I couldn't find it). So I inserted the photo into good ole Microsoft Word and added the text I wanted.

I sized the page to legal size because my image was much longer than it was wide and I could get a bigger print that way. I just printed it on the printer on regular paper to see how the quality came out. I figured if I didn't like it I could always send it to a print shop and get it made on nice paper, but since it was going behind glass anyway I liked it just the way it was.

But before I framed it, I stopped.

This print would replace the picture I hung in Hannah's nursery last year. I took one last look at that frame with the pictures of my family. The ladies that I wanted so badly for Hannah to recognize and talk about as she woke up and looked at each morning. And I smiled because I know she gets to see two of them in ways I can't. I'm sure they're all running around heaven bragging on her and showing her off and pinching her cheeks like good grandmothers do. (The other lady in the picture is still living, by the way, I didn't want you to think I meant she went somewhere else!)

And then I slipped the picture out of the frame. And I put the new one in. And then for good measure I decided to leave the old picture in the back of the frame.

Sure there are new things coming, but that doesn't mean we don't still love the old ones.