Man Art

Is there such a thing as man art?  No you say?  Sit tight while I prove you wrong.  And why might you ask am I on the subject of man art?  Well….here’s the story in a nut shell.  The majority of the house is uber girly.  I’m going for a cottage style with bright, girly colors and pink, there has to be pink in my house!  The office space, however, is a different story.  I purposely tried to make it slightly more masculine with a rich looking blue, dark stained wood, and a leather couch.  The space is currently my study sanctuary but as soon as I’m done school we’re moving Colby in (and organizing him simultaneously…that should be fun…cackle cackle).  And now we’ve come to the accessorizing portion of the office makeover story.  We have a huge blank canvas to work with over the couch, see:

And I needed to come up with some sort of art project to fill the void.  I found some great frames at AC Moore and have been stalking them for the past month or so.  I’ve bought about a dozen of them one at a time thanks to the AC Moore 40% off one regularly priced item coupon (I LOVE coupons!).  Each frame ended up costing only about $3.00, what a score!  Here’s the pile of frames:

It’s a little hard to tell from that picture but they’re floating frames.  There’s no matting to them but clear glass.  Thus, you can see the wall right through the frame adding a little more interest than your typical frame?  I wanted to arrange the frames on the wall in a gallery fashion.  I wasn’t sure of the configuration I wanted: either a 2 x 5 grid or a 3 x 5 grid.  To test it out, I traced the frames onto some paper, cut them out, and taped them to the wall.  Here’s the 2 x 5 grid:

There was still a lot of blue space that needed to be filled.  So I added another row:

Perfect!  It’s exactly what I had envisioned!  Now…what to put in the frames?  I thought about printed note cards, or patterned paper, or maybe even some trip photos.  Nothing seemed just right.  And then the perfect solution came to mind….drum roll please……bar coasters!

What’s more manly than bar coasters?  Instant man art.  AND I already had a collection of about 30 coasters going.  Over the years I had picked up bar coasters from various trips that I thought we’re interesting or unusual and the pack rat in me kept them thinking I would use them for something someday.  And they look so cool in the frames.  Here’s a sample:

Now I just need to make a few more trips to the craft store and get my hammer wielding boyfriend to help me hang them.  He’s so good with a hammer and tape measure!