Whatever Wednesday: DIY Family Tree Wall

 

A while back my friend, Tracy, contacted me to ask if I could help her put a family tree on her wall.

Originally I was thinking it would be something along these lines:

This was shared with me on Facebook; I don't know the original source. If you do, please feel free to let me know.

You know, this picture is on a small flat wall.  Cute, minimalistic and elegant.  

That type of wall is what I was imagining when I agreed to go help my friend.  Complete with an oak tree, sycamore or some other hard-wood type tree. 

When I got to her house, she pointed to the wall where she wanted to tree; right up her stairwell!  

Gliding up the stairwell with an oak tree just would not work.  So, I checked out drawings of willow trees and wind blown trees on Google images.  

And came up with this drawing on paper for her space: 

Then started to sketch it on the wall with a pencil.  

Tracy and I debated for a while about what type of paint to use.  Initially she bought brown craft paint, but she had some really great blue-green accents in her house, so we ended up with a dark teal. We also decided that using semi-gloss wall paint would be best. And it's a good thing we ended up with a pint of wall paint instead of two bottles of craft paint - because we used about half of the pint or more!

This was a really fun project! Mostly because I got to hear so many fun and interesting stories about Tracy's ancestors.  Overall the project probably took about 6 hours to finish.  I couldn't really time it well because we were having too much fun looking at chatting and looking at photos to decide which one could go where.

PS - The pictures are in order.  Her progenitors on are the trunk and her ancestral lines climb up the stair wall.