Up and Away Nursery - Chic Paper Airplanes, Cool Kites and Haute Air Balloons

My Fall 2012 series of children's wall art has just been released and I'm excited to share three of the pieces with you.  This group entitled Up and Away is a little twist on the traditional transportation theme.  Here I've explored things that float, sail and cruise through the sky.

Racing to and fro, these geometric motif paper
airplanes are filled with color and wonder.
Canvas reproductions are available on my site and
through boutiques nationwide.

Kites adorned with fanciful patterns fill the sky.
Canvas reproductions are available on my site and
through boutiques nationwide.

Patterned hot air balloons float aloft in this children's wall
art piece.  Canvas reproductions are available on my site and
through boutiques nationwide.

The series fits perfectly into the pattern rich and muted color trends popular in children's furniture and textiles.  To inspire you, I'm happy to offer this Up and Away mood board featuring my picks for a little boy's nursery.   Its subtle skyward theme comes through with the addition of adorable cloud mobiles, a sunburst mirror and waving pennant bunting.  For good measure, keep babies head warm with a hand knit aviator's cap.

All You Need is Love - Girl Nursery and Bedroom Ideas

I'm happy to announce the release of two of my latest children's wall art canvases.  These are part of my Flea Market Finds Collection.

The Love Bubbles Canvas speak of love in a rainbow of colors.
Available from my website and boutiques nationwide.

You Fill My Heart With Love shows the many layers of love in
a prism of brilliant colors.
Available from my website and boutiques nationwide.

These and other pieces from the collection are inspired by the folk and hand wrought one-of-a-kinds you would find at Flea Markets.  Whenever I travel, I love to hit the local flea markets.  My love of vintage signage and quirky folk art always has me hunting for my next art treasure.  Within these works, I was inspired to create imagery with that unique art appeal and offer it in a color palette that compliments todays nursery and bedroom textiles.  The sweet sentiment of "You Fill My Heart With Love" is a perfect expression of my love of text and painted word art.

Here you might enjoy two mood boards, one for a nursery and the second a girl's bedroom.  If you are interested in the art, it is available from my website boutique or from hundreds of retailers nationwide that carry my line.  If you would prefer to shop locally, send me your zip code and I'll locate your nearest retailer.  Keep in mind, EmbellishmentsKids.com offers e-consults and travel based design packages for nurseries, kid's and teen room.  See our website for information.

Enjoy!
-Aaron

Purple Glitter in My Paper Cut, Thanks Justin Bieber!

Over the years, my kids have become numb to the weird and wondrous stuff that leaves my studio.  They know, with a little smile and a hug, that I'll turn the studio upside down to create whatever their aspiring art director hearts desire.  Sucker!  Well, the prince of pop, Justin Bieber was coming to town and my daughter's studio wish list was submitted for my consideration.  "Oh, Dad...I don't want to ask for too much, but do you think you can make me a T-shirt and a sign?," she asked with a smile.  "I promised my friends you would make them some too!," she slipped in at the end.  Sucker!

Cut up t-shirts

What's a dad to do?  Get busy of course!  For the t-shirts we cut up the lower part of Bieber purple t-shirts and knotted them to create a fringed look.  I had recently acquired a Silhouette cutting system, so I thought I'd put it to task cutting out her text of choice to use as a reversed stencil, which was Belieber #1.   Placing the stencil on the shirt acts as a mask for the fabric spray paint.

With a few coats of Simply Spray's stencil spray, the purple was covered.  Peeling the stencil revealed the purple shirt color underneath.

She wanted signs to catch the attention of the local radio station, who was giving away seat upgrades.  If she and her two friends each had a part of the sign then for sure they'd upgrade all three of their tickets.

For the signs, I cut out the stations logo in black foam core in two sizes.  One was covered with glue and glittered black and silver.  The other was coated in purple.  Sandwiched in between the layers, I duct taped little battery operated LED lights.  Her favorite part was using two print outs of Mr. Bieber's face as the centers of the zeros.

Decked out in their Bieber wares, holding their flashy signs did the trick!  They caught the attention of the pop star reviewing the crowd from above.

Justin Bieber gives the girls two thumbs up.

As for the seat upgrades, well... the radio station was only upgrading tickets from the upper levels to the floor, which they already had.   Oh well... they we're rewarded by catching his attention and receiving the two thumbs up from the purple pop star.

 She and her friends had a great time.   Which makes it all worthwhile.  Now, if only I could get the purple super fans to help clean up the whirlwind of glitter that's everywhere in the studio and wedged in the "blood, sweat and tears" paper cut I gave myself wrestling the lights onto the foam core.

Thank you Justin Bieber for the opportunity to bond with my girl, her friends and sport bits of purple glitter.  I guess if you can be the purple pop-star, I can be the purple glittered craft dad.

What kind of extraordinary crafty things have you created to make your kids happy?

Kid's Room Trends- closing out 2012 and welcoming 2013

  In her latest post, up on SheKnows.com contributor Susie Fougerousse, kid biz mommy of five taps a few industry experts to get their opinions on the trends closing out 2012.  Embellishments Kids owner, designer and kids art go-to-guy, Aaron Christensen shares his picks for the year end.

 An upcoming feature, here on the Embellishments Kids blog will explore Aaron's trend finds and elaborate on the SheKnows article.

Get-a-way - A Room for a Teen Longing for Paradise

Dig your feet in the sand, lay back and sun yourself.   In this mood board featuring my American Byway's Prop Plane art, I've assembled a room for the young guy who longs for travel and exotic locals.  Borrowing from the hot trend of reclaimed lumber, deconstructed furniture and primal materials, the design brings home the textures and colors of the beach, preferably one in an far off paradise.

Visit my website for the art and details on how I can help you design your children's, teen, tween and youthful spaces.

Pin It To Win It! Up Your Chances To Win!

My friends at Rosenberry Rooms, one of the fantastic retailers that feature my children's wall art line shown here is hosting a Pinterest contest.

Basically, create a Pin worthy Pinterest Board featuring Rosenberry products, following their instructions here and you can be entered to win one of three prize levels totaling $3000.00 in merchandise.

Well, I'd love to increase your chances at a win.  If you feature my wall art or products that can be found on Rosenberry Rooms in your Pinterest Board submission, I'll enter you in my own drawing for up to $300.00 of my wall art.  While many may enter their contest, you'll only be competing with those that use my products in my contest.  Imagine winning both!

To be qualified in my drawing, you must 1) Enter your submission in Rosenberry Room's contest following their criteria, by their deadline.  2) Send me, by email a copy or link to your Pinterest submission. 3) Follow me on Pinterest.

The winning Pin board featuring my goodies will be chosen randomly.  All entries will be featured on my Facebook page and a fab new Pinterest Board.  Winner will be contacted via email.

Please note, my contest is not sponsored by Rosenberry Rooms and their winner has no correlation to whom I randomly select.  Email me if you have any questions.  Their contest entry ends October 4th with a winner selected on the 18th. The winner* of my contest, will be selected by October 6th.

Get busy and start designing your Pinterest Board today!

You can find my art featured here on Rosenberry!  There's over 150 products to choose from!

*continental US residents only.  Sorry Canada!

Render a Gender- Designing a Neutral Nursery for Baby

 There's a segment of the population that want their baby's gender to be a surprise until birth.  If completing the newborn's nursery ahead of time is a priority, then for sure the term gender neutral comes up.  Oh, but how I wish we could adopt a term other than gender neutral to describe that desire.  Gender neutral sounds like a physical impairment or a sarcastic answer to a Match.com dating preference question.  Regardless, whether they are inny-outty-unsure, seat up or seat down undecided or reproductive representation reserved, those choosing to wait on their baby's sex have decor decisions to make in their nursery.

From all angles in my work as a kids designer and artist creating art and products for the retail marketplace the trend of color is being shouted from the mountain tops.  How's color a trend you may ask?  Well, the trend nerds who spend their every waking hour looking for hints on how to forecast consumer's buying habits all look into 2013 and beyond as years of saturated color.  They are proclaiming the full spectrum of rainbow colored hues IS the new black.   They say it has a causality relationship between our rebounding economy and the need to feel optimistic, re-energized and alive!  Alive with color....say it with me....ALIVE WITH COLOR!  Extra points for your jazz hands and open mouth smiles, well done reader, well done!

This gotta-have color trend relates back to my topic of gender neutral, because basically, I'm not a big fan of mousey mint and rubber duck yellow.  Those official colors of nursery neutrality are tired and thankfully my most recent nursery client agreed.  When I brought up the topic of color, in our initial client meeting, I met no resistance to pushing the color palette into the super saturated one.

My client was ever so happy to put faith in my decisions and abilities.  She used the magic words "I trust you!"  So off I went shopping for fabrics and all that might inspire a color rich room while trying to remain neutral to gender or, P or V identification procrastination.   Having hit every fabric resource in town with my faithful designer counterpart Shannon Ponciano, whom was designing the rest of the clients home, we came upon a terrific abstractive chevron fabric.  It was color rich, fun yet sophisticated.

This fabric choice led me to my fellow children's artist Melanie Mikecz's wall art entitled the Rainbow Zebra.  What a beautiful mix of happy colors, a fun subject and textures I am so drawn to.  I was delighted to frame the piece with a custom frame, made here in the studio.

From there the room's design rapidly came into fruition.  I planned on saturating the walls with a deep teal, adding a vanilla framed color block of green on the ceiling and furnishing the room with blasts of color and the neutrals grey and white.

Throughout the home's interior, rustic woods are being used in modern ways, so I designed corner shelves for the nursery and constructed them out of 50 year old reclaimed barn wood topped with an acrylic polyurethane finish and lined with burnt orange paint.

For those of you that know me, you are aware of my love for building and creating unique items for my kid's spaces.  I drew up several ideas for a crib mobile and was ready to build my favorite until I came across a terrific DIY, by Jaime over at Sew She Sew's.  Her mobile design was an amazing mix of homespun ingenuity and artful elegance.  I couldn't imagine a better fit for the nursery.

Having solved the mobile dilemma my attention turned to props and accessories.  I created a custom alphabet piece, a vintage wood mirror and a cute green chalkboard to compliment the grouping anchored by a 30 inch tall giraffe sculpture.

A Red Ryder wagon entered my studio brand new, out of the box, and left a distressed and faux antiqued piece ready to act as a bookshelf along the room's bank of windows.
Inspired by the crib fabric I chose to render one wall with a series of elongated zig zags inviting more color into the room.

Once baby arrives the room can evolve to impart a more feminine or masculine attitude.  Of course that depends on their little one either having a wee wee or a she wee!  Yep, after that, I'm fresh out of gender neutral terms.

I have an extremely happy client, I've made the hidden from sunlight trend seekers proud and most of all had a lot of fun.  I did however piss off all of those mint and yellow fans.  Oh, well....sorry, I'll repay you in 20 years when the whole southwestern pastel aztec trend reemerges like a zombie.  Aaaaaahhhhh!

Best,
Aaron

This nursery is featured until September 23rd in an open home tour, in Vancouver Washington.  The homeowners are opening their newly completed home to visitors as part of the Clark County Parade of Homes.  If you're in town, I'd love to have you drop by and check it out.

Of course, I'd love to hear your comments here or you can join me on my Facebook page, where I'll share a few more details.  For you Pinning Peeps I've loaded up the collection of photos on a Pinterest board for you to share.