ENJOYING THE MOMENT IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT
One of the things I like to do is see what people hang on the walls of their homes. For me, I really enjoy the pieces we have collected over the years, whether it was an original piece of art, a poster, or the painted mask of our daughter’s face from when she was in kindergarten. But probably one of my favorites is the framed matchbooks that both my husband and I collected, before and after we were married. So look around your house AND envision what you have that you can call art. Create with something you have and “enjoy the moment.”
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Gail Gabriel
Life Styled Editor
"My spring project this year was filling up space on a blank wall in our living room, without spending thousands of dollars on an original piece of artwork."
LIFE STYLED
There are a lot of ways to “enjoy the moment,” OR to “be in the moment.” Take music for instance. Whether it is the melody or the words in a song, for most of us we relate music to something — a time, a place, a person, a relationship, an activity or event. It reminds us of the past, the present and perhaps even the future. It can be all encompassing.
With todays technology, we can listen to music on any number of devices — a computer, an iPad, a cellphone, or in a vehicle. So what happens to all the music we have stored in our physical environment, i.e. records, tapes, CDs.
Well . . . depending on your age, you might have cabinets or shelves filled with record albums, tapes or CDs. So what are you going to do with all of those items, when music is so readily available on other sources? One suggestion could be to sell them on eBay or craigslist or at a garage sale, and have lots of
extra storage space; another suggestion might be to enjoy them by playing them on a regular basis; and a further suggestion might be to turn some of them into an art piece.
So here is one way to “be in the moment” and “enjoy the moment” in your environment all at the same time.
My spring project this year was filling up space on a blank wall in our living room, without spending thousands of dollars on an original piece of artwork. This might start as a temporary display or it could end up as a permanent one.
This is how it happened. One day I took all of our record albums out of the cabinet and set them up against the walls in several rooms. It was quite a collection as my husband and I have different tastes when it comes to music. So this mystery artwork is probably now coming into focus. And you are correct — framed album jackets. This is not a new idea, but you don’t see it in many
houses that you visit. It tends to be in restaurants or places that sell the frames sized to fit the album jackets.
So here was the process:
- Buy number of frames desired (our number was 9; and they came 3 to a pack),
- Select 9 album jackets to be framed,
- Agree upon one and each (my husband and I) select 4 others,
- Consider how they all look once framed so they will make an effective art piece, and
- Play each of the albums and decide if you still like it and if not get rid of it.
This is not an overnight process, especially playing all the music; but it is a fun and enjoyable process. Once the albums are selected the fun begins, as you need to line them up (or at least this is the way we did it — 3 rows of 3 frames. To make this task easier, you could put the frames up in a random manner, or choose more or less frames.
Another fun idea is to just put the records on the wall and instead of the art pieces being in squares they would be in circles, or it could be a combination of both. It is really up to you.
Should you choose to do this for a project, you can get empty album jackets online. Then you can put the records of the album jackets you framed back with the rest of your collection.
The one benefit of this piece of artwork is that you can change the album jackets very easily, so the display colors and graphics can be changed out with different ones on a monthly or yearly basis just to keep it fresh and new. The hardest part of this process is deciding which album jackets you want displayed.
So whatever your project might be “enjoy the moment” and “be in the moment.”
WILLIAMS-SANOMA
METRO MARKET PLACE
