Mother's (and mother and mothers and mothers...) DAy

Mother's day used to be a sort of second tier holiday that I took for granted.  I thought of it as a Hallmark Holiday and not one that required a great deal of effort and usually did little more than call my mom.  Many years I sent flowers or a gift but I never thought of it as a biggie.

Then I lost my mom and I regret not celebrating it to the max all the while.  It's ironic that the person who would most dig the creative display projects featured on this blog was my mother.  I wish I had learned to do some of this earlier.  She loved antiques, pictures and other vestiges of our Americana heritage more than anyone else in my family and she would have loved this next project.

With no one I can call Mom (no step mothers, no living grandmothers, no mother in laws) I am off the hook now for this holiday but the void on this day after losing Mom is much more intense than any other day for some reason.

Anyway, while updating my ancestry.com file with pictures I've gathered from more distant family members, I noticed that I had an unusually long string of photos (by number of generations) in one of my lines.  And even more interestingly, they were up the purely maternal line.  Damn....why isn't Mom here to show, I thought.

Then thought of how this string continued on through my sister to her daughter making an unbroken line of SEVEN generations of mothers and daughters of whom I have photographs...so....my sister is a mother...I decided I would celebrate mother's day with her by honoring her since she is the closest relative of mine who is a mother herself.  And this crazy luck re the photographs was a perfect opportunity.

This would be difficult to design however.  There were a lot of issues to ponder.  All black and white or do I use color when I have it?  What format is best and how can I put seven photos in one display without it being very big or with pictures too small to actually see unless the viewer was right next to it.

In the end, i decided to go with 4x6 photos side by side which would mean that I would need a pretty wide frame.  My usual frame vendor had a frame that would work well enough from a width perspective but would leave a lot of space above and below the photos.

So what to do with that space.  I could put biographies below each one but that would detract from the simplicity of the message.  Perhaps just a label below it.  I decided on the latter to say something like 172 years of mothers and daughters 1841-2013.  The only problem was that it was a pretty long title and my printer would only print a page 11 inches long which was a mere fraction of the entire width.  Plus, it looked rather...I don't know....plain and uninteresting have an opening n the mat for that phrase in a perfectly rectangle box.

The it came to me...what about those little scroll like things below coats of arms that have mottos and such?  I would have to do it some way that only uses straight lines as my mat cutter is not magic...But, I thought to myself, a mottoesque scroll is a little masculine for this project...maybe it's not such a great idea here....what could soften it up a bit?  That would allow me to split up the entire thing into three pieces meaning I wouldn't be limited to 11 inches total in width.

Then it occurred to me that if I made the scroll look more like a hair ribbon than a scroll of parchment, it would fit better with the theme.  So I used a light blue textured fill with white stripes and a font that was pretty but not overly ornate or gaudy.  Then I cut out the seven frames for the pictures and inserted photographs of each of the seven mothers and daughters with a brief label on the bottom of each that displayed their name, their birth and death year and their relationship to their daughter (save for my niece who I described as daughter of my sister).

The result is one of my favorite projects to date.  The first thing my sister said when she saw it was "Oh David, Mom would have loved this."  Alas...

A More Contemporary Decor Idea...

Earlier, I demonstrated a way to celebrate one of my Ellis Island/20th century immigrant using his certificate of citizenship, ship's manifest from his voyage, and a photograph of the ship on which he arrived.

Today, I will bump up the degree of difficulty and creativity to make something celebrating this same man but which results in a more contemporary decor look.

Once again, I used the citizenship certificate of my great grandfather, Jan Paruch.

This time however, I used a photo editor to remove the wrinkles and old lines which would be more noticeable and less appropriate for this purpose.  Then, I in effect, made 9 copies of the certificate from a very high resolution scan each of which was 8.5" x 11" the same size as the whole original.  For each copy, however, I cropped the image to only use 1/9th of the overall image each one of a 3x3 subsection of the whole.  One of these images looks so:

Now the reason this works is because the original document was of such high resolution (including the tiny photo of my great grandfather attached to it!) coupled with access to a high resolution scan that loses near nothing of the original.

The next steps include trimming the image to an 8x10 size and gluing it to some gesso board (masonite).  Then, I glued a thicker gesso board block of greater thickness but much smaller in width and height, to the back to the board so that when I hung it on the wall, the panel with the image would not be flush with the wall but rather "floating" out from the wall creating a shadow and depth.

Finally, I made a faux picture frame out of standard wood trim I found at the hardware store and some satin black paint and some wood glue.  To mount it on the wall, I found S shaped brackets that are used for some legimate purpose I presume and used glue to adhere them to the frame.

And because this was a panel display that requires precise placement of each panel to make a whole, I mounted all of these panels and the frame using Velcro tape adhesive which allows for adjustment of the panel position.

And voila, a more contemporary styled display for a more modern look despite the less than contemporary subject.  I placed this one over my bar in the foyer and I think you can see the scale of the project from the bottles of liquor below it.  It may be harder to see in a picture but the frame and panels are all an inch away from the wall.

What do you think?