Easy, inexpensive DIY wall art

I'm one of those people that comes through in the clutch. The great thing about this is when there is an emergency I am great at keeping calm, organizing things and acting quickly to get things done. The bad part about this is that oftentimes I will procrastinate until I absolutely have to do something. Decorating my house is no different.  I have so much inspiration and great ideas in my head, but once I get home from work that motivation completely dissipates and I end up laying down on the couch, realizing how comfortable it is and taking a nap until Shaun gets home.

I had Brittany, my best friend since I was born who I grew up next to in Baltimore come to stay this past weekend and I realized on Saturday that the 2nd floor of my home was severely neglected, including the guest room.

Amidst all of the frantic, last minute cleaning and laundry I was struck with a sudden burst of creative energy. I realized I wanted to make some sort of art for the guest bedroom but I didn't have time to run out to the store for frames, nor did I want to spend a ton of money on something that I would rarely ever get to see.

So here's what I did.

I ended up with 8 clipboards that I picked up from the Dollar store forever ago in hopes to do something creative with them. I knew I wanted to line them up in some sort of a pattern to make the illusion of a large piece of art.

My initial desire was to do vintage botanical prints from Etsy but most of the nice ones I found were about $10 a piece. I knew I didn't want to spend $88 as I felt I could totally spend that on something better. Like shoes. Or ice cream.

So I tried to do something really cheap that would probably have a horrible result. Google image search. I thought, some website would certainly have a few prints I could print out and then perhaps I could add something in between if I could only come up with a couple. The google gods were shining upon me that day because I found a website that had great quality, full page vintage botanical prints that were free to download and print! Sweet sweet cheap success! It ended up taking me forever to print them since I used the best quality printing but it was totally worth it in the end. I printed on some Matte presentation paper I had that was a good, thick quality so they wouldn't blow around if I had a window open, which I often do.

After this I just trimmed the small border around each print, clipped it gingerly to the clipboard and hung them on the wall with pushpins.

This room isn't done either. I'm picturing some art on the wall that the bed is against and then some curtains. However I'm just happy to have a guest room that people can come and sleep in. 

 I ended up using only 6 in the guest room because I really loved one of the prints and dreaded the fact that I would only see it in the spare bedroom. So I took 2 and placed one above my nightstand and another above my craft room desk

I also went back later in the day and made some little yarn balls  to put in the lamps that had been sitting empty because once I start crafting, I usually end up doing much more than just the initial thing I planned on.

Even though I feel like our bedroom is the least finished room in the house and I'm totally not happy with the furniture, I feel like it's finally starting to come together and I'm happy with the progress. I'll just have to be patient with that and enjoy the fact that Shaun hasn't complained too much about my choice of decor.

Yes, I know, I totally could have been thorough and used picture hanging nails and perhaps a level and a tape measure to measure it out. But I'm also impatient, so push pins and eyeballing it had to do.  I'm sure sometime in the future I will end up going back and doing it the right way but for last minute decor I think I did pretty well especially for a solid piece of decor for $6!