I am a hockey mom. It’s not all I am, of course, but with three boys in competitive hockey it sometimes really does feel like hockey fills every nook and cranny of our lives. I took that feeling to its literal extreme this week with this hockey DIY project, and in less than 15 minutes, I filled a tiny corner of Middlest’s room with a hockey vignette.
My project began with a trip to Blacks. We were invited to visit the store on Yonge at Eglinton to experience their Playground for Photography, and I was inspired the minute I walked through the doors. We were introduced to a myriad of ideas for taking photos to the next level, from pillow cases, to phone covers to bound books, but I was most captivated by the gallery wall. Humble instagram photos really came to life grouped together and mounted on interesting surfaces. (I will be writing about my own gallery of photos from my daily walks for our Photography Month in June!)
Blacks kindly offered us a sample of a mounted photo, and I chose one of Middlest right after he had scored a goal. Here is the original, taken with my iPhone in less than ideal conditions through plexiglass and with him in motion. I mention this because you really do not need to begin with a perfect photo for this to work.
I mistakenly shot the photo with a filter on my phone camera, but it was a fortuitous mistake. I then cropped the picture and added shading to the corners and deep focus to blur the edges with Phototoaster.
This is the image I gave to Blacks, and I chose to mount it on a metal plate that really complimented the tone and texture of the image. Metal wall art begins at $34.99 for an image that measures 8 x 8, which is the size that I had.
I love the mounted image, and I was so excited to find a place to hang it. The photo is small, but I wanted to give it pride of place, so I knew that it would have to be part of a vignette, and the wall by Middlest’s bed was the perfect spot for it.
Books are as big a part of our lives as hockey, and they really fill every nook and cranny of this house, so it made sense to include books in the vignette, too. I put up an invisible book shelf from Umbra to ground the vignette with a stack of hockey books.
Then I set one of the many, many hockey trophies this boy has already collected on top of the books. And voila! A quick and simple project to honour the ways we fill our days (and nights, and weekends, and holidays, and….)
4 Mothers 