Happy Weekend, Friends!
I’ve realized that I have really never shared anything about Robert and my home and it’s about time. So I thought I’d share one of my favorite nooks/projects, which is a wall in our dining room.
Why:
Our dining room has a long solid wall on one side. For me, it was screaming for attention in a way that would be both graphically beautiful and symbolically significant to Robert and me. The large wall needed something proportionately to scale, and it was important to us to incorporate meaning into the piece we installed on the wall.
Concept:
We decided to create a visual representation of all of the important dates in our lives in a way that could be evolved overtime to incorporate additional important dates.
What:
Secondly (also important) it was mandatory that we be able to create a piece that was low-cost for install (i.e. DIY) and was made with low-cost materials. On a whim trip to Home Depot I wondered over to the paint department and found a treasure chest full of paints that people had returned and were on clearance. I picked up a $50 can of dark-grey paint for $12. Then headed over to hobby lobby, bought some white string for $4 with my 40% off coupon (of course). Then went to Habitat Restore and picked up a big box of reclaimed nails for $1.50. These materials gave us our medium and foundation of our project for under $20. We painted a large rectangle on the wall. Drafted out our grid system, and nailed a single nail in each of the points on our grid.
How:
Robert and I spent some time outlining in chronological order the most important dates throughout our lives, from birth to current time. We listed these dates strategically with in the following format (00.00.0000). By doing this we gave ourselves a long list of our data or coordinates. Each of these coordinates we each symbolic and represented a significant event in our lives. With our coordinates in hand, we decided to throw in a little chance to the visual representation of the coordinates. Our chance factor = Dice. We systematically broke down each 8 digit coordinate into pairs, meaning, 4 pairs per date. Each individual pair included 2 dice rolls. The first roll which was assigned the first number in the pair determined how many units the point moved up/down, the second roll which was assigned with the second number in the pair determined how many units the point moved left/right. To find the starting point, we let the dice decide based on the same pair system mentioned above. In the end, our string left off on a point unconnected to any other points our string had crossed. We love that because it is a clear symbol of the many important dates to come in the future.
Hope you have a great rest of the weekend!
All my best,
Haley
haley ottmann 