Craft Project: Cheap Vintage Wallart

As you may already have gathered, I love to fill my home with pretty vintage things, and I am constantly looking out for ways to do this on a student budget.  The picture display on my living room wall (which I will probably share on here soon) is one of my proudest thifting achievements, being made up of 15 separate pieces of art which collectively cost about £10 - thanks, car boot sales!

At the boot sale last weekend, this colourful little book caught my eye:

Sadly, when I opened it up, I found a few of the pages had come loose and some were missing, but the pictures inside were so cute that I decided to give them a new lease of life.  If you're looking for a super cheap and easy way to get some original wallart, this is the perfect solution - just have a look around boot sales or charity shops for some cheap frames and a book with pictures that you love.

To create your fancy vintage art, first remove the pages from the book by cutting along the spine with a craft knife and then carefully separating the individual pages.  As a booklover, this did feel like a bit of a criminal act, but reminding myself that the book was falling to bits anyway made it a bit easier to cope with!

Here are some of the pages I didn't use, I'm going to save them for future projects.  I looked the book up online and discovered it was part of a rare 1970s range of Ladybird books designed for children from an Afro-Caribbean background.  I love all the vibrant colours and tropical animals in the pictures, it's much more exciting than the Ladybird books I had as a child with pictures of cats and dogs!  It was difficult to choose between them all, but I eventually settled on three images to use:

These pretty colourful birds...

These children being happy about glass bottles of Coke...

...and these lovely retro Fanta bottles.

My frames looked a bit dull so I decided to paint them orange.  I also backed the pictures with coloured card as they were slightly too small for the frames, if you decide to do this most frames come with a piece of paper inside that you can use as a template, or you could measure the inside of the frame and make your own.

Here are my completed pictures, I'm very happy with how they turned out!

It was difficult to get a good picture as it's been raining non-stop here in Dundee for the past few days meaning that natural light is pretty much non-existent...  I'll be sure to take another picture once they are hung on the walls though.  I'm thinking of using some of the leftover pictures to make a series of pictures for my baby niece Lottie, they would look great in her 70s style bedroom!

Faye

xxx