Faking It

I know that's a horrible post title but it will all make sense in just a moment. So, my obsession with the Young House Love blog continues and most days I'm reading about their latest projects or checking out links to other projects. They did some Pinterest stuff recently and I decided to see what the site was all about. I don't understand it at all but there are dozens of craft ideas with pictures and I came upon this one.
So cute! Then I tried to figure out how I could do something similar and change the initials in the tree (duh). I enlarged the picture to fill a regular sheet of paper (8 1/2 x 11) and printed it on thick paper. Then I cut out the tree using an x-acto knife. I taped my "stencil" onto a 9 x 12 canvas from Hobby Lobby and traced it with a pencil.


Then I removed the stencil and painted inside the lines with some wall paint (more on that later). I purchased another color for the birds, which is supposed to be dark grey but looks black. Ta da!
It looks like I hand painted it (sort of) but I just filled in the lines, thus faking it. This whole process did take some time and it's not as detailed as the original image but I love, love, love it and it's personalized in a subtle way.
I will do another post so you can see where this little guy will be staying but that project is not complete yet. Stay tuned...