Creative Together

Alexa is incredibly creative. Our house is full of charming, quirky, cute, and/or useful touches that have made our apartment feel warm and inviting (see here, for example).

Recently, we decided to work a project together, and I got to take a more active role (when compared to, say, sanding...). After a speed bump or two that delayed the project, we finally finished!

Here's what we did.

First, we got four blank 16x20 canvases.

Then, we painted the canvases four different colors (colors that matched throw pillows in our family room).

We had a plan for each of these canvases. Since getting married, we've spent time in four different states - California, Utah, Oregon, and, now, Washington. We wanted to create recognizable skylines representative of each of those states. From here, we found shapes and buildings for each skyline, and drew those shapes on a piece of vinyl that we then stuck to each canvas. We also cut out the state name in vinyl and stuck in near the bottom. It went sort of like this.

That was definitely the hardest step. Lost a little hair doing all of that.

After that, we painted everything on the bottom of the canvas black.

Once all the paint dried, we pulled off the vinyl and here's what was left.

California, where we both grew up. San Francisco is close to where Alexa grew up, and the Oakland Temple (overlooking the city) is where we were married.

Utah, where we went to college and did most of our dating. We did a blend of Provo and Salt Lake City, with the mountains (even Squaw Peak) in the background.

Oregon, where I spent a summer. I had gotten an internship in Portland, but we were house-sitting for family at the time, so Alexa had to stay behind in Utah. It was a long, tough summer, but Alexa was able to come out often enough to visit. We had a lot of adventures.

Washington, where we've ended up for now. My internship led to a full time job, and took us to Seattle and the greater Puget Sound. We moved here just two weeks after Will was born.

It feels nice to finally have them all up on our wall!

And our next project? Well, we're going to take it easy. We found an awesome little ferry at a garage sale just this past weekend, and we're going to paint it. Suggestions?