Lucky Us

I have a confession to make – I’m addicted to Pinterest. Which may sound like a negative thing, but I bet if you asked Seth he would tell you he doesn’t mind. You see, one of my boards is ‘recipes’ and so I’ve been trying new recipes on the regular, (this from a woman who typically doesn’t cook...or at least not well) so he loves it. But not only have I been getting my cook on, I’ve been gettin’ my craftiness on as well. So with “Make/buy/find/personalize entryway art” on the top of my list-of-things-to-do-around-the-house I decided to put my own little spin on something that I recently ‘pinned.’ Here’s the original pin:

Source

Super cute – huh?!

I don’t happen to have a machine in my back pocket that stamps out words onto copper so that was out of the question. But I do have pennies. Baller! Also, I wanted to somehow create something to go on the wall rather than a keychain, so I suppose the photo above was more like inspiration, or should we call it...pinspiration? I couldn't resist.

So I dug through the plethora of piggy banks in our house, one for each child (yes, our not-yet-conceived child has a piggy bank and there is 54 dollars in change in that mo'fo - Ari counted)... 

...until I found these babies

Their significance? The year that’s printed on each of them.

There’s the year Seth and I got married and then everyone’s (mine, Seth's, Ethan's, Ari's and Owen's) birth year. I played around with a few layouts. The first, and most obvious one I came up with was a pyrimid.

But I wasn't diggin' it. So the next layout I toyed around with was making the number one with the pennies.

Yet again, I wasn't happy. So I walked away - a technique I used when I was in college if I experienced writer's block. Works every time. So 20 minutes and half a glass of wine later I came up with the idea of a family tree, but instead of putting names on the tree I'd put the pennies on the tree. 

So I just freehanded the silhouette of a tree onto black card stock and got to cuttin.' From there, I used white sticky letters that I dug out of my closet (which still needs organized, mentioned here) and put the words “Lucky Us” to the side of the tree.

Oh, and to make the pennies a bit shiner I just plopped them in a mixture of ¼ cup of vinegar and 1 tsp salt for  5 minutes. After I removed them from the vinegar concoction I immediately rinsed and dried ‘em.

So there you have it, my Pinterest inspired art for our teeny tiny entryway which I'm trying to slowly transform into something I can be happy to look at on a daily basis. Now if only I can find something to do with these shoes…

 Xo,

Lorri