5 Ideas to Create Home Decor Items with a Family Theme

Making unique décor items for your home or to give away as gifts is fun and often creates a special piece of art that may become a family heirloom. Many different items can be made into art. Take a look around your home and think about what items could be used to create a memorable piece of art.

Enlarge a Recipe

If you have a special recipe you cook a lot you may want to make a piece of art by enlarging it to poster size. Then later that poster will be very special to your children. Stores like Kinkos will create this art for you. Or, if you have recipes preserved from an old family cookbook you may wish to create a poster of one of them to honor someone special.

If you know how to paint or do calligraphy you could hand-paint a recipe on a large canvas or write it out in calligraphy. A piece of art created from a recipe will be eye catching. It will also make the recipe easy to see and use. If the recipe you use for the poster is hand-written by a relative, spouse or partner that will make the art poster even more special.

Make a Hand Print Table

If you see a cheap wood table at a garage sale or the flea market buy it to make a hand print table. This can be a fun family project. Sand down the table a bit so it will be easy to apply new varnish to the table. Then ask each child in a family to place their hand on the table so you can use a small paintbrush to paint around the hand. Then you will have an image of each child's hand on the table. Glue on some photos of the children to the table too. Let the glue and paint dry for at least a day. Then use some varnish to seal the items onto the table and to make a waterproof barrier on the table.

Frame a Teaspoon

If you had a favorite relative who liked to invite you over for tea, it is a wonderful art idea to have one of her or his teaspoons framed. Keeping inherited teaspoons in the kitchen for use is nice. It is also lovely to have one of the spoons framed so you will see it every day.

Hand a framed spoon in the dining room or living room so you see it during meals or when relaxing in the living room. Seeing this piece of art will bring back wonderful memories and remind you of that special person. Framing one spoon also helps preserve it so future generations can have something that once belonged to a relative many generations back.

Multi-Picture Frame to Show Generations of a Family

It is wonderful to have several different generations of a family in one picture frame. Find a horizontal or vertical frame that will hold three or four photos of size eight inches by ten inches. Then add photos a great grand mother, grandmother and mother of a new child.

Placing this framed set of photos in a child's room will give them a sense of family history as he or she is growing up. I never saw a photo of the great grandmother I was named after until I was an adult. Now I have it hanging in my living room. I enjoy looking at the picture every day. It gives me a sense of history and continuity. So use a multi-picture frame to preserve your family history for future generations.

Frame Wallpaper

Families are on the go in this modern world. Often, by the time a child grows up he or she may have lived in many different homes as the family moves about the country or the state. Thus, once a child is at an age to remember their bedroom, it is a cute idea to frame some of the wallpaper used to decorate the room.

This will always remind them of a time when they were young and of what their bedroom looked like. If wall paper is not used in the room you could always make a piece of art by painting a canvas in the same color paint that was used on the bedroom walls.

Frame Old Envelopes

It is amazing how quickly postage rates change and people move around. Thus an old envelope an elder relative received when a child can be a historic family heirloom when framed.

If kids spend a lot of time at a grandparents' home, that address will be very special to them. Thus if you frame an envelope from the time period from when the kids are young it will later be a very special heirloom. It will show them how postage rates have shown too. It is amazing how just an old envelope with a postal stamp on it can seem so special and historic after decades pass from when the envelope was mailed.

There are many different projects you can do to make a family heirloom. To see additional projects, including a project using canning jars to preserve memories of a family vacation, go to the Martha Stewart magazine, here.

Sources:

Personal Experience

Martha Stewart