DIY Project

It's been a while since I've done any sort of interesting or meaningful post (imho).  So how about a DIY project to fill all that free time you must have as Christmas and New Year's are fast approaching!  You may remember that in the not so distant past, I started redecorating Hi-Hat's bedroom.  I got the walls painted, vinyl wall decal installed, and new bedding in place.  Then I kind of stalled out.  But this morning I picked up the project again and got another piece of wall art done: a CD jewel case wall mural using a photo of Hi-Hat on his drums.  The following project was not my own brain child, but rather was inspired by the fine folks over at photojojo, who come up with just the coolest DIY photo projects.  Maybe when I grow up I can work for them.  Not because I'm particularly creative in their sort of way, but so I can drink from their creative juices.  Anyway.  Back to the project.

First, I selected a photo with the right subject, colors and resolution to blow up and put on  Hi-Hat's bedroom wall.  Sigh.  The actual image resides on my other computer, so you'll just have to wait until the end of the post to see the image.  The next part was a tad bit tricky and requires use of a photo editing program, such as the ever handy-dandy Photoshop Elements.  I'll spare you all the nitty gritty details (because you can get them straight from photojoj by clicking right here).  Basically, I resized my image and then cropped it to pieces - to 20 individual 5 3/8" x 4 5/8" square-ishes.  Then I had all these individual pieces printed.  Here's what arrived from the printer:

While waiting for all these prints to arrive, I headed over to Big Box Office Supply Store and purchased a stack of old-school CD cases.  Not the sleek, jewel toned slim-line ones, but the thicker standard kind with the black plastic insert that hold the CD.   Then I took a kitchen knife and popped out all those black plastic inserts.

 Stacks of clear plastic jewel cases are so pretty.  Lets have another look at them.  

Then I had to trim some excess white border off of my 5x7 prints (because my printer is awesome, but 5 3/8" x 4 5/8" is not a standard print size.  Yet.).

Then I inserted each photo piece into a jewel case (after mounting each photo on a piece of corrugated cardboard cut to size so that the photo would fit snugly in the case and not shift or float around.  Cutting all those cardboard squares was a boring, tedious task that I did not photograph, but I include mention of it in case you need something to do with all those, say, Amazon boxes that have been appearing on your doorstep this time of year.  They work perfectly well).  OK. So now I basically have a stack of puzzle pieces in the form of jewel cases.  

And no, I was not smart enough to have given each photo piece a file name indicating its position in the mural when I first did all that cropping.  If I had done that, the top left image would have "1A" printed on the back, the piece below that would have "2A," and so on and so forth to the last image, "4E," in strict Battleship form.  No.  I did not do this.  Instead I had to enlist the help of Fancy the puzzle wiz to help me assemble the pieces.

Next, the good folks at photojojo suggest installing the pieces on the wall using adhesive Velcro squares.  I had to think twice about this, as I have experience with hanging light-weight decorative mirrors in kid spaces using Velcro squares and experience with catching said mirrors as they fall from the wall and narrowly miss 6-month-olds sitting directly beneath them.  No worries friends - this was YEARS ago when I just had one small child and was not yet a good mom.  har har har.  So, I was not interested in Velcro, even though a lightweight jewel case falling from the wall onto dear Hi-Hat's head would probably do minimal damage at this point.  Instead, I decided to go with this product:

They hold strong and supposedly can be removed without damaging the wall.  Did I test them first to see if indeed this was the case?  har har har.

OK, so I have a stack of cases (stacked in order now, thank you), mounting squares, pencil and handy dandy level to mark the wall with a nicely centered level line along which I would then place the bottom row of jewel cases.  

Once the first case was up, the other pieces were ridiculously easy to install.  I just had to line up horizontal and vertical edges and make sure everything stayed square.

As I was installing the cases, Hi-Hat would come and go to check on me.  During one of his visits I got the bright idea to have him autograph one of the squares.  And I just so happened to have a permanent paint pen the exact color of his freshly painted walls in my kitchen junk pen/pencil/scissor/Box Tops for Education/receipt/hairbow/guitar strings/Chuck E Cheese token/etc drawer.  What prepared mom doesn't?  

And after just a few minutes of peeling and sticking and positioning, Hi-Hat's cool wall mural project was done!

What's great about this mural is now that it is installed, if Hi-Hat's interests change down the road or if we decide to one day redecorate, all I have to do is open each jewel case, pop out the image, and replace it with a new one.  And you don't even have to crop apart one giant image - you could do a collage of lots of different little images or even pop favorite old CDs in them to display.  Great project photojojo!  And seriously, it took me longer to write this post than to do the actual project.