painting – Thinker Mommy

Minted.com Art Collection Review

I have a mild obsession with home decor. Not that I actually go through with most of it, but man, I ~~could~~ spend hours pouring over Pottery Barn catalogs, Martha Stuart Living magazines and Pinterest (oh my god the ideas on Pinterest!). Now that we’re done with apartment living and finally in a house of our own, the obsession has grown 100 fold but our light blue master bedroom walls, for example, are still completely bare after almost half a year here. (yikes!)

You might know Minted.com for their beautiful & customizable cards, invitations and birth announcements. But did you know they also sell ornaments, garlands, table runners, day planners, personalizable photo backdrops and tons more? When Minted approached me to review their Art Marketplace, I took it as a sign it’s time to start getting serious about decorating my house.

Some gorgeous artwork available at Minted.com

First, I love how easy it is to navigate the Minted.com site. With their filters, if you’re looking for specific artwork, say a personalizable print for your little boy … no problem. How about limited edition, abstract art in non-traditional colors and a portrait layout? Yep, they’ve got a bunch of those too. It’s really amazing how much variety Minted offers (and how much of it I liked!).

But, I still wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted, so I let my kids go first and hoped for inspiration along the way. The kids previously had an ocean inspired theme to their bedroom, but as my daughter has recently developed an all-consuming obsession with bright orange (luckily we convinced her to go with just one wall instead of the whole room), the marine life doesn’t really fit as well as it once did. We picked an orange color filter (of course) at Minted.com/Art and scrolled through the limited edition prints. My daughter immediately began calling out favorites:

I also love that if you scroll down to the bottom of any page, Minted shows you a person holding the art in every size offered so you can see exactly how big your picture will be when it arrives. And, when you click on a frame, you can see how each picture will look in each specific frame. Some pictures even have a few different customizable color options like the Schooner design below. Although I do know what an 8×10 looks like, I found myself checking to see how the print looked every time – it was comforting and sometimes actually had me going bigger or smaller.

I’m still looking through all the options, but once I make my final decision and place my order, I’ll be sure to share with you what I think about these prints and frames in person. And if you’re looking for a great Christmas gift, there’s still time with 2 day or overnight shipping!

Plus take advantage of these great offers: Enjoy 20% off art & gifts. Code: GIFT20 | Free 2-day shipping on art orders $75+. Code: ARTFS2

This post is sponsored by minted.com. I received a Minted credit in exchange for my time and honest review. My opinions and ridiculously awesome picks are 100% mine.

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Ocean Nursery Update 3 – The Squid Dresser

We’re getting close to the finish line with this pregnancy so I’ve been insane about finishing up all our little projects for the nursery (also called nesting)- the good news is that most of them were started long ago and are just waiting on a few final touches. For example, the dresser. The dresser was delayed because of super humid days and lots of rain which didn’t work out so well for airbrushing with water-based paint (i.e. on humid days, it seemed hours of work could come right off if you just breathed too strongly on it). Luckily, the weather finally cooperated!

The dresser re-do only had 4 steps:

changing the ugly drawer pulls
painting the dresser blue
airbrushing a cool design
clear-coat to protect it and seal in any VOCs from the airbrushing

The drawer pulls were originally brass but are pictured below right after we tried painting them blue to match the dresser. Still ugly and too busy looking, so we decided to replace them with really simple round knobs. Also my husband and I both hated how noisy drawer pulls like these are (especially when your toddler figures out how to lift and drop the handles). Unfortunately, the screw holes from the original drawer pulls were too large (and although we could have suffered, the outer holes seemed too far apart and the inner holes too close together) so Nick drilled new holes for our knobs and puttied the old ones.

New dresser knobs

old dresser handles – didn’t like them in blue either

Step number 2 was to paint the dresser blue in our fabulous No-VOC Mythic Paint (we went with the Blue Cadet color). I love how just changing the color made it immediately look so much happier! I was originally voting for a white dresser but I’m glad I let Nick change my mind. And I never really noticed the cool scrolling on the bottom of the dresser until after we’d painted it – kind of like some edgy design you’d see on a piece at IKEA. (yes, I love IKEA).

dresser and daughter in blue

And the final step was my husband’s vision. He decided on a squid, in keeping with our ocean theme, and when I mentioned that the white splatter-like detail on his tentacles reminded me of a view of the universe from space, he was inspired to add some stars as background (also our little Muffin absolutely LOVES stars).