DIY wall art

Since we bought our house 3 1/2 years ago, I’ve been staring at these two ugly vents over our fireplace:

I don’t know really what they do exactly… I’ve never felt air coming out of them. I suppose they help to take air into the chimney when there is a fire in the fireplace? Anyway… they’re just ugly.

A couple of years ago I bought two of these Ikea frames- with the intention of finding a couple of cool prints to go in them:

They sat around for a long time, and after many searches on etsy for the perfect print, I kind of gave up and forgot how much I hated the ugly vents. But, recently the urge hit me to cover them. STAT!

So, I took a bit of inspiration from the September cover of Martha and got to work.

I decided to piece together a bunch of random fabrics in the same (general) color family to make an apple and a pear.

I started with a shape that I cut from cardstock. Here’s my pear:

Then, I cut random widths of my fabrics and sewed them together:

I ironed my seams out, and then ironed some lightweight interfacing to the back. Then, using my cardstock cut-out, I traced the pear onto the back, and cut it out!

It was missing something (besides the stem- but we’ll get to that). So, I topstitched some gold thread on a few of the seams…

Next, I used a little fabric glue on the back of the pear, and placed it on a square of natural muslin. I had some brown leather on hand and made a stem, and glued that to the muslin as well.

Then, I put it in the frame… and got a couple of nails and a hammer:

And that’s it!

This was an enjoyable project to make that just sort of came together as I sewed.

I’m not married to these though, and I can see in the winter maybe piecing together a pine cone, or a tree… etc. It was fun to rifle through my fabric stash and see what I had that inspired me.

I especially like that the vents are now out of sight! Goodbye ugly!

-Erin