Making Ohio Sparkle

Remember when we shared this wall collage inspiration?  Well I finally completed our first piece of symbolic art to put on the striped wall.  Hooray!  I wanted to craft a piece that showed where we reside.    We love the city we live in--it has so much beauty and character.  So why not share how much we love it by making it sparkle?

The first thing I did was find an outline of Ohio.  I printed it out on copy paper.

Next, I cut around the outline.

Instead of framing a plain piece of paper, I decided to glue my outline of Ohio onto the back of a pizza box.  I used super glue to glue it onto the cardboard.  I wanted it to be sturdy and raised from the background.  After gluing it to the cardboard, I cut around the outline a second time.

The above picture may not be too pretty, but I promise the end result is worth looking at.  The next step was to paint a heart where Dayton lies in the state of Ohio.  I used a toothpick and teal blue paint that I had on hand.

Then came the fun part!  The part that made me say, "Oh la la!" and of course it involved glitter!  I used a Q-tip to apply glue to the top of the paper outline, making sure to work around the heart and not on top of it.  Then I sprinkled gold glitter on top.  LOTS OF IT!  

After shaking off the excess glitter, my sparkling state looked like this:

In order to make the background for my frame, I took a coral colored envelope and cut it to size.

My envelope was 5 inches tall, so I made a mark with my pencil next to each inch.  I then took gold chevron washi tape and ran it along each of the four lines I made with my pencil.

Next I glued my glittery outline of Ohio onto my background.

The final step was to put my sparkling beauty in one of our IKEA frames.  This particular frame measures 5 x 7" and is from the RIBBA collection.  

I believe this will be a nice addition to our wall once we get it all pieced together.  

Do you have a gallery wall full of homemade art in your home?  Share it with us!  We still have lots of work to do before our gallery wall goes up, but we are already excited to see what it'll look like when it's finished! :)