As G & I prepared for vacation and the wedding we were a little stuck on what to give the bride and groom. I always try to do something personal and not on a registry because that's me and we had already decided on a gift certificate so I wanted to make sure to get something special in there too. As we thought I looked at their wedding invite and remembered how much I loved their vintage bicycle theme. Their invites featured two bikes and a tandem and somehow I knew I wanted to incorporate their love of cycling into the gift. I had seen a lot of things on the web using old books as a paper to print on so I thought I'd give it a go.
I was stumped on where I would find great vintage bike images on a short time frame and just happened to stumble upon some on Etsy. Yes, who know you could by downloadable digital art off Etsy and for a $1 no less?! (This site is amazing and FULL of all sorts of images if you are on the hunt for some great quality and diversity of objects for seriously $1, or old encyclopedias work great too.) Anywho, I downloaded the images and used pages out of an old book (specifically Romeo & Juliet then going with the dictionary in the end) for the paper and printed them up. I grabbed some coordinating frames and called it good. I did do a little photoshopping to get a shadow under all of the bikes so they didn't look like they were floating aimlessly but that was by no means necessary. I also suggest some trial prints to make sure the text is all going the same direction behind your images and that you don't have any strange words sticking out at you. I went with a series of three to reflect their children (boy and a girl) as well as them on the tandem. I kept the size to 5x7 so they could hang them anywhere and the layout works well horizontal or vertical, and chose neutral frames in brown and black to match most decor, just all good things to keep in mind when giving a gift or making something for yourself. Overall I was glad with how it turned out and I think I did it for just about $30 (frames are a little pricey).
I can't wait to try out a print for myself with this raven and I already have a frame I own in mind to house the print in my bathroom! (In fact if you like that raven just click on it and it will open a new window and you can pull the image to your desktop) You can even buy iron on transfers to put vintage images on tea towels, canvas totes or pillow cases. I would love a great graphic pillow case dyed with tea and printed with a fun image, I don't know about you.
very cool! nice work. and i like the raven!
ReplyDeleteso creative! i just love it Les. might need your help picking out some prints for my house.
ReplyDelete