~DIY Lavender Wall Art~

Graphic Wall Art Tutorial

One of my favorite hobbies is gardening. In the last few years, I have been growing lavender and now it takes up a lot of my flower beds. I'm in love with these delicate and fragrant bushes. They are easy to maintain and you can do so much with them. We have made sachet's, bath bombs, and last week, we showed you how we used the green sprigs in our dining room place settings. When I ran across a lavender botanical graphic, I knew I had to make something for my wall.

A few months ago, I saw a really simple way to enlarge a print and hang it with dow rods and twine on Pinterest. This tutorial was from Joanna Gaines blog, which you can find here.

The lavender graphic I am using for my project, is from "The Graphics Fairy". I downloaded the graphic onto a flash drive and took it to my local office store and had them enlarge it to 21 1/2" x 29 1/2" poster print. The cost can range between $15-$19 to run a print of this size. I am going to research the cost of printing large prints online because I think you could probably get it done cheaper that way. Since I was in a hurry to get this project done and didn't want to wait for shipping time, I paid $19 for my print. The paper I used was a lighter weight (24 lb) and matte. You could do a heavier poster weight and glossy but it will cost more to do it that way.

The office store trimmed the sides of the print, as there was about an inch space of white paper around the graphic. Here is what it looked like after printing and trimming the sides down around the graphic:

I purchased a two foot dow rod that would work perfectly for the size of my graphic print. I bought two dow rods, but you will only need one two foot rod for this project, which you will cut in half at 24 inches. You want your dow rods to be a few inches wider than the print. In my case, the print was 21 1/2 inches wide and the rod was 24 inches, which left 1 1/4 inches for the rod on either side of the print.

You can stain or paint the dow rods to give them some character or leave it raw wood if that works best for your application. We stained our dow rods a dark walnut stain by MinWax.

Once the stained wood was dry, we used small eye hooks to fasten on the ends of the dow rods at the top of the print. The eye hooks are used to fasten the twine at the top of your print for hanging. You will fasten the twine on the last step.

We stapled the print to the back of the dow rods, flipping the print to the back side and the dow rods positioned underneath the print, in order to staple it in with proper placing.

Lastly, we attached our twine, tying a knot of twine through the eye hook.

Once finished, we hung our print in the empty wall space in our living room.

What do you think? Pretty fun, huh?

What I love about this DIY Project is all the possibilities that it offers! I will be looking on The Graphics Fairly for some more great wall art ideas this week. She has some incredible graphics and so many categories that I could literally spend all day browsing!

Until next time...I will leave you with this quote,

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."

Albert Einstein