DIY Nursery Art

Earlier this year we showed you our small space before & after, and so many of you asked about the art on the wall.  It happens to be from an old project we did for a friend years ago for her baby-to-be nursery.  The simple answer is the prints came from this vintage book...

 ABC du Pere Castor, a 1930's French children's book we found online, while pursuing through old books.  Now the easy thing would have been to tear out the pages and have them framed.  Which is still a great idea for easy art!  However, we wanted the prints to be a different size and we wanted the aged pages to have a white backdrop as well as translate each to English.  For the white backdrop, we had the pages scanned by a high resolution scanner, making the files digital.  Then used a simple, old version, photo editing program from Microsoft to edit the pictures.  For the translation, some pages didn't' need to be edited...

Others needed the names translated to English ~ which we did in Mircrosoft Word.

And then others we needed to change entirely.  Case in point this Donkey we changed to the letter "D" and had the Monkey changed to the letter A for Ape...and so on.

Proving, you can edit old pages from a book to make great, relevant art!  And if all that seems too tricky, frame the originals!  For this room, we used our leftover copies, and framed them in these $2 frames!

Now, the funny side story on this project is once we finished, we found this image online, then, after some online digging, found out that these flashcards had been sold through Martha by Mail then later at Michaels in either 2009 or 2010.  I recently did a search to see if I could find them for you guys and unfortunately, I came up empty handed.  So, if you're LOVING these prints, search for the original book or keep your eye open for Martha's flashcard version through places like ebay.