Emmalynn’s Tree

Today my mom and dad came over to help Lan paint Em’s room. I busied myself putting away Christmas decorations since I knew I should be around all of the fumes. I suppose having other people paint your house and not having to help is a perk to being pregnant :) It is amazing how much a simple coat of paint can do for a room. It looked so much brighter and happier with it’s light blue walls.

I have played around with a lot of different ideas for how to decorate her room, and one reoccurring theme was kind of nature themed, but girly. So I decided that I wanted to paint a white tree where her crib was going to go. I knew that I didn’t want to hang anything over her crib (living in earth quake country taught me that), but I wanted something cute. I found an idea on pinterest, and Lan helped me execute my plan.

A normal person could use a regular overhead and a transparency… but not us. Lan had conveniently hacked a overhead projector and a computer recently to make an digital projector. What is on top of the overhead is actually the screen from a computer. We hooked his laptop up to the whole contraption so that it could project whatever we wanted.

After we got the size and spot that we wanted, I began to trace the outline of the tree with a pencil. I traced just inside the tree so that when I painted, I would cover the pencil marks.

Then I got painting. I started at the top and worked my way down so that I wouldn’t smear.

It only took about one cup of paint and about two hours to paint the whole tree. I love how it turned out. I can’t wait for the trim to get painted (our last painting step) so we can move everything in and get it all set up.