My Beach Wall – Shadowbox Love

Aloha!

I told you I’d be back shortly with some actual posts for my blog!

If you took a minute to vote over at One Month to Win It, I hope you were able to pick out my project “Bathroom Wall Art”. I was in a rush to send it over and neglected to enlarge my photos, so sorry for the craptastic-ness there. What a bummer!  But luckily, enough people saw through the horrible pics and voted for me, so I’m moving on to round two this week. 🙂

Since I’m not limited to three pics here, I’ll be separating all of them to give you a better view of everything! Sweet.  I know you’re excited, right? 😉

Our downstairs half bath has been mostly finished for about a month now. I still had to paint the door and get new hinges and a door knob installed, and I just printed out and threw up some random pictures of a sea turtle and a yellow hibiscus (ya know…since we live in Hawaii and all). I thought the bright colors would be a good contrast to the gray wall and flooring and would liven up the place, but mostly they just didn’t feel quite right, and I didn’t have the “oh, wow” feeling when I walked into the room that I was looking for. Just kinda lack luster.

Then as I was flipping through my latest Ballard, I came across these:

Cute! And beachy! But a little bland with ALL shells, and at $39??  Not gonna happen. But it got my wheels turning…

I’ve had these shadow boxes for about 7 years or so. I originally purchased them at Michaels to display some of the small trinkets we brought back from Africa. I painted them browns and greens nad glazed over the inside. We have plenty of large trinkets up, and I was bored with the display, so I haven’t even bothered putting them up in our last three moves since we knew we’d only be there a year (or much less in some cases). They were just sitting in my garage begging to be used.

This next one is real seaweed that my husband collected while doing research at Hopkins Marine Station where he took a semester and did marine biology research. He collected about 8 different samples and dried them out himself (this was a month before we even met, ladies…he thought this out all on his own)! But then he just left them all on a piece of paper all dried out. I found them in a trunk about 4 years after we’d been married and thought they were pretty awesome, so I cut them out, ModPodged them to paper and put them in small frames and hung them in our bathroom. The little frames were a maroon color to match the seaweed. But again…I was sick of the display but still wanted to salvage something from it. So this one little guy stayed, and his frame got a new coat of paint and some distressing. Mahalo to Scott for his foresight into decorating our beachy home 10 years early. 😉

I LOVE clocks. Can you tell??  Just check my sidebar and popular posts or visit my Home Tour page to see just how many clock make-overs I’ve done recently. I think all rooms should have clocks. And I had a favorite watch I once wore for about 1.5 years straight (showered and slept in it and everything) during my first pregnancy and just after. It eventually died, and I was never able to find another one as awesome or as comfortable or that matched all my outfits as well, so now I resort to my iPhone and clocks everywhere in my house.

The guest bath is no exception. But I needed something small, and I wanted vintage feel. I found an awesome pocket-watch-style clock at Pottery Barn and knew I could find a cheaper one as the concept isn’t original to them. Ebay had quite a few options, but shipping to Hawaii kicks my butt. So I resorted to driving across the island to Wally World where I just knew I’d find something. Sure enough…a perfect match!  It had a weird handle-thing on the top that I just removed, but other than that, this is the Wal-mart $9.99 clock in all its glory. I truly love it. I think it finishes the wall perfectly!

The starfish was one we had laying around from one of our bazillion trips to the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet. It was kind of a no-brainer for the space…

And finally, we’re back to the Ballard knock-off. The shells. Also another Aloha Swap Meet find, but I’ve seen them at craft stores and Wally World as well. We have quite the collection at this point, so I just sorted through to find matching white ones, and one lovely orange-ish coral one to match the wall art on my other wall I’ll be showing later this week.

The idea of cutting glass didn’t scare me off, and that was what I was originally planning to do. Until I came across an old box made out of stiff plastic. You know the kind. It’s found on the front of kids’ toy packaging all over the world. Barbies and super hero action figures, etc. If you have kids, I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of them around your house. But I found it’s the perfect cheap and easy alternative to cutting my own glass!  It was thick enough to hold in the shells just right, thin enough to be cut with scissors or a razor, and hot glued like a champ!  I just layed it right on top of the shadow box, cut around the edges with scissors (I moved the edges out just slightly to cut, so that when I moved them back, there wouldn’t be a lip from the thickness of the scissors). Then I put one small dab of hot glue in each of the four corners. I didn’t want the obvious hot glue streak across the entire front, and you can’t even see it! I was thrilled with myself and my cleverness. 😉  (It’s my blog, and I’ll brag if I want to.)

And there you have it!  My beachy shadowbox wall art!  I honestly love it. It fits the room so well. Has just the right amount of variety, color, personality, and sentimental touches. 🙂