First Dance Wedding Art

It’s officially, Colby and I have been married for exactly three months (as of yesterday).  And we JUST booked our honeymoon and JUST sent all our disposable cameras from the reception to be developed and JUST sent out the last thank you note and JUST made our first piece of wedding related art.  Run on sentence say what?!  I framed up a pic from our first dance and wrote the lyrics from our first dance on the picture frame mat.  Adorable say what?!

It was a pretty easy project to do and it’s got me all amped up to do a few more wedding memorabilia art projects.  But let’s step through this one first, shall we?!  It all started with the frame.  I found the perfect frame at Target.  It’s one of those Threshold for Target  frames and was $16.99 before a 20% weekend sale discount plus my 5% Target card discount for a whopping $12.91.  Whoa big spendah!  It was the perfect frame for the project.  It holds a 5 x 7 picture, which I also had printed at Target for about $1.22, but has an oversize mat leaving plenty of room to transpose the song lyrics.

I should also mention what our first dance song was.  It was Eric Church’s “I Love Your Love The Most”.  I know, it is VERY unconventional for a first dance song.  And it includes words such as hell, Redman, four-wheel drive, eight-point buck, Nascar, and more.  Redneck say what?!  But we love the song.  Even more, we love the man behind the song.  Early on in our dating years we went to a Miranda Lambert/Eric Church concert and fell HARD for Eric Church.  I may have threatened to leave Colby for Eric Church if A) he wasn’t married and B) he showed a remote amount of interest in me among his hundreds of thousands of followers.  Lucky for Colby, Mr. Church doesn’t even know I exist.  But I still think he’s pretty much amazing.  The concert led to our Eric Church obsession which led to us “dedicating” the “I love your love the most” song to each other which meant it pretty much became “our song”.  We’ve been known to break out into a slow clap dance in our living room to the song from time to time.  Colby’s pretty much the cutest.

Okay, so back to crafting.  I noticed that part of the mat was covered by the frame so I made sure to give myself some margins.  Using a pencil and a straight edge, I lightly drew lines on the picture mat as guides so the frame wouldn’t cover up any of the lyrics.

Then, armed with my Netbook with the song lyrics brought up, I began to write.  I didn’t really need to have the lyrics up on the computer screen.  I pretty much know every word to that song.  But it’s one of those anthem singer at a hockey game situations.  They always need the lyrics up on the humungo-tron to follow along even though they know every word.  It’s just their security blanket.

So with my security blanket I began to write away, using a piece of paper as a straight edge to help me keep the lines straight and evenly spaced.

I thought about trying to figure out a way to type up the lyrics and print them and glue them onto the mat, or somehow transpose the print onto it, but I wanted to keep the project simple and opted just to hand write it out.  As one of my best friends says, “keep it simple, stay the course”.  He’s so smart!  And it helped that I have decently neat handwriting.

It’s a short song with simple lyrics, so it took two rounds of copying the lyrics over to the picture mat to fill it out.  It’s not perfect by any means but it has what Colby and I like to call “character”.  Sometimes we mix it up and call it old world style.  But it’s the imperfections in projects that usually make us love them more.

There ended up being a little extra space at the bottom of the mat, so to fill it up I just added a line for the song artist, Eric Church, and called it good.

Then I added the picture, assembled the frame, and called it good.  I love it.  Really really REALLY love it!  And Colby does too, although he would never admit it due to recent run-ins with the cheese police.  If he gets busted by the cheese police one more time, I’m pretty sure he loses his man card for life.

We haven’t yet hung our newly created art as I’m working on a mini art gallery situation and haven’t finished all the pieces yet.  But the first dance art is destined for the naked walls of our bedroom.  So stay tuned for a few more art projects, an Etsy find and a finished and hung bedroom art gallery.  Fingers crossed it all comes together by the end of the week!

Pssst…Not only did I art it up this weekend but I spent some SERIOUS time going through photos, making photo albums, and general memory making projects.  I’m oh so close to whipping up an “Our Wedding” post with TONS of photos and stories for you all.  It’s way over due!

Psssssst…Now it’s your turn!  Dish…how did you guys spend your weekend?!  Any art projects going on out there?!