If you are familiar with my blog, you might know that I have done quite a few variations of these punch pictures. Click the links to check out the previous cupcake, sand dollar, heart, and palm tree versions. I really love making these, as you can probably tell. They are such a quick and easy project if you need some wall decor. Each picture has only taken me about an hour to complete. But what I really love about these is that there are countless variations you can create and they're very easy to personalize.
For this particular picture, my mom asked me to create something for my brother's bedroom, which has one empty wall that needed some decoration. My brother's favorite color is blue so his walls are painted a pale blue and he has a blue plaid Nautica comforter, so the obvious choice was to make a nautical picture. Back in the old days, my mom would have asked me to paint something like the picture below, which I painted in high school and currently hangs in my family's basement. She knows that I rarely make time to paint anymore, especially since I haven't felt very inspired (blah).
Hopefully I will find some painting inspiration soon! Anyway, for this picture I used the Fiskars Sail Away large sailboat punch and the Martha Stewart anchor punch. This was the toughest one of these I've done so far, for a few different reasons. First, my intention was to use three punches and make a line of sailboats, a line of waves, and a line of anchors. I tracked down the Sail Away and Makin' Waves limited edition punches specifically for this picture, but I really hated how the shapes all looked together. The Fiskars large punches are generally pretty consistent in size, although Sail Away is somewhat large, probably because it has three components. The Makin' Waves punch is really big in person. It's somewhere between a large and an extra-large in my opinion. Martha Stewart's punches are generally all one size, usually what I would consider between a medium and a large, closer to a large. When I lined the three shapes up next to each other, it looked absolutely ridiculous. I really wanted to give the effect that the boats were floating on water, so I even tried using the Boundary Waters border punch to make a line of waves between the sailboats and the anchors. That just looked kind of weird. My mom and I decided it would look best with just the sailboats and the anchors. We also had trouble deciding what color background to use. I had bought several options, and we had originally decided on using a sandy beige color. I set about punching all the anchors out of medium and dark blue papers, some plain and some patterned. I cut all the bottoms of the sailboats out of white textured cardstock. I wanted this picture to be very neutral and not girly, so I decided to cut all of the sails out of very neutral, faintly patterned papers. Once I had punched everything out, I lined them all up and my mom still hated it! She told me it looked very "blah." So we decided to use a pale blue background paper instead of the beige and I added some color by alternating brightly colored sails with semi-neutral ones. I tried very hard to use papers with stripes and bold patterns so that they would look like sails you might actually see on a sailboat. I used tons of different DCWV stacks to find the colored and neutral sails, but all of the anchors came from the K & Company Sheer Simplicity Blue pad. Please check out my list of craft supplies for details on the items I have used. Here's a detail shot of the end result:
In case you can't see the pattern, here it is:
- Red, Semi-neutral, Orange, Semi-neutral, Yellow Sails
- Blue Anchors randomly alternating patterned and plain
- Semi-neutral, Green, Semi-neutral, Blue, Semi-neutral Sails
- Blue Anchors randomly alternating patterned and plain
- Red, Semi-neutral, Orange, Semi-neutral, Yellow Sails
- Blue Anchors randomly alternating patterned and plain
For the anchors, I described them as randomly alternating because there's no real pattern. I just tried to vary the shades of blue and tried to place patterned anchors underneath sails that wouldn't clash too much. I am describing some of the sails as "semi-neutral" because they are not as vibrantly colored as the others. I had originally punched very neutral patterns, but I liked these better. If you click on the picture to enlarge, you can see that the colors in the "semi-neutrals" also follow the color pattern. As usual, I attached everything using adhesive squares. Looking at the photos, I can see that some of them are not quite straight, so I might need to go back and correct that. This was very challenging because I had to line up three components for each sailboat, which was much more difficult than lining up one or even two (like the cupcake has). It was also difficult to attach the anchors because the shape is so thin. I actually had to cut my tiny adhesive squares in half to attach them and it was hard to line them up straight. Although this picture gave me so much trouble, I really like how it turned out in the end! I think this would be absolutely adorable for a baby boy's room, except that I might use blue only. I have another spin on this picture in mind, so keep your eye out for it in the future. Hope you guys have a great day!
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