Vows and 3D art

We wrote our own vows for our wedding and the vows were one of my favourite parts of our wedding (along with the beach, and my husband singing, and the salt ceremony, and my father singing and the dancing, and the toasts, oh and the food, and the cake was yummy - actually I loved it all). Post-wedding I kept taking sneak peeks at the email that contained the text of my husband's vows, and on occasion, I'll admit it, at my own too. So, it seemed like a good idea to have our vows displayed in our bedroom so that I could re-read them and gloat whenever I wanted (and, of course,  point to particular lines during a fight and say a-ha, that is not what you promised).

First I attempted to find someone else who I could pay to do the job for me. I really liked the Geezees Etsy store, but the prices are rather steep. Also, the more I thought about it, the keener I became to have the vows displayed in our own handwriting - spidery and ugly though that might be compared to all the pretty fonts out there.

My second idea was to write up our vows, take photos of them, have the photos printed out and framed.

Then, I happened upon the Umbra 3D wallflower art and, for reasons I cannot explain, it became imperative that these flowers participated in the vow related art project. So, I ordered them and Amazon had them waiting at my doorstep the next day.

While I was waiting (a whole day and half!) for the flowers to arrive, it seemed like a good idea to get the vows ready to hang. I decided that I did not have the patience to wait for photos to be printed, and that I did not want to shop for frames. I actually did not want to shop at all because a) I was feeling lazy and b) It was cold and rainy out. So I dug through my meager supplies at home and found that I had two 8*10 canvases, stretched on wood frames just lying around, begging to be used. Twenty minutes later I had two canvases ready - I used acrylic paint and a sponge brush. The soon-to-be-vow-wall is red and so I picked the yellowey-orangey background for the canvas.

Then it was go time - putting it all together. I laid out the flowers on the carpet and fidgeted with them for a bit. I added the two canvases, and then called upon THO for his aesthetic input. He fidgeted with the flowers till they were just so and then I had to get them on to the wall. For the most part this turned out to be much easier than I expected. As I moved each piece (canvas or flower) from the floor to the wall, I marked it's position on the floor with a push pin. That way I could measure the distance between push pins on the floor, measure the same distance on the wall, and reproduce the pattern. Here is what the floor looked like, with a mix of pins, flowers and canvas:

and this is the wall taking shape:

The flowers attach to the wall with little round bits of adhesive tape (included in the box). Three of the flowers drove me insane. The moment I took my eyes off them they would fall right off and lie around innocently on the floor as if they had no idea how they got there. This got disheartening after a bit, but I come from hardy stock and my middle name is keep-at-it-with-bloody-minded-determination, so I ended up winning that battle. For now. The trust is broken though; I eye the flowers with grim suspicion every time I go past that wall.
This is what it looked like with all the flowers and both canvases up on the wall:

All that remained was to write our vows. My vows in their entirety were too long to fit, so I had to extract a modest selection of text. We used black sharpies, added one more crucial flower to the wall and voila: