Bumble Bee Running

I saw this on Pin­ter­est and imme­di­ately fell in love.

There was no orig­i­nal source attrib­uted to it, so I was bummed.…for a while. Then I real­ized I could pretty eas­ily make some­thing sim­i­lar to this that would look fab­u­lous in our library, and play off the tile squares in my future cof­fee table, which is cur­rently being made but will look like this:

8 times out of 10, isn’t mak­ing some­thing more fun than buy­ing? Which is a lot for me to say, because I love buy­ing (which is why I couldn’t say 9 times out of 10. Also, there are times that I just can’t make things– case in point, I bought that cof­fee table, I’m not mak­ing it. For a rea­son. Some­one can obvi­ously make it, but Lord knows that per­son is not me).

This, though…this I could make. And just like that, a Pinterest-inspired project was born.

Want to make one of your own? You’ll need:

• Frame with mat
• Square punch (unless you trust your­self to free­hand the cuts, which I do not)
• Paint chips
• Photo mount­ing tape

I chose an 18“x24” frame and a mat with a 12“x18” open­ing, and bought a 1″ square punch so that I’d have a per­fect 12 squares across and 18 squares down. Since it’s pretty rare that any­thing I do is that sim­ple, though, my 12“x18” mat turned out to really be about 11.75″ x 17.75″. The art store explained this to me, say­ing that it allows for art to over­hang the mat when you frame it. How­ever, I mea­sured a bunch of other mats whose open­ings mea­sured exactly the size they said they were, so I guess this is a crap shoot. Learn from me and bring a mea­sur­ing tape with you the first time, to be sure.

I used all blue paint chips, to fit the color scheme of our library room. And, in case any­one is won­der­ing, each square is a dif­fer­ent shade of blue (that’s 216 blues!). I used chips from Home Depot, Lowe’s and Ace Hard­ware to be sure that each color was dif­fer­ent. This cer­tainly is not a nec­es­sary part of the project, but for some rea­son hav­ing each unique color appealed to me. I just love the fact that there’s more than 200 col­ors here, even if the vari­a­tions are some­times ever-so-slight. At the same time, I think this would be an amaz­ing project in any & all col­ors of the rain­bow, how­ever you choose to com­bine them!

After punch­ing out the squares, I spread them out on our din­ing room table and arranged them in rows of sim­i­lar col­ors (ie gray blues, green blues, blue blues etc) from light to dark. In some cases, the string of col­ors was 20 or so long, some I kept short at 4 or 5 squares. Then I just started lay­ing them out 12 across on the table. Where a string of col­ors was longer than 12, I sim­ply con­tin­ued it onto the next line. When I got through a string of col­ors, I just ran­domly started with the next one. This allows for some con­ti­nu­ity of shad­ing with­out an obvi­ous pat­tern or struc­ture to the fin­ished piece.

When you’ve got your entire sequence in place, take a step back and look it over to be sure you like how it ended up. I only made one change to mine, which was really more a result of my over­an­a­lyt­i­cal nature…I removed a blue that was a lit­tle too green . Then, attach the photo mount­ing tape to the back of each square, and begin tap­ing in rows across a piece of paper or card­board. I taped mine to the paper insert that came with the frame, and started with the mat in place over it, to be sure that my top line was straight. This is an impor­tant part, because if it starts going crooked all the rows below will be crooked, and your per­fect 1“x 1″ squares won’t fit prop­erly. The nice thing about the photo tape is you can repo­si­tion the squares with­out an issue.

This part gets a lit­tle tedious as you have to apply tape and care­fully place each square (in my case,216 of them). And you really have to take the time to be sure each square is evenly placed. But the fin­ished result is so worth it.  You have a fun lit­tle art project that barely costs more than the frame to frame it in, and when peo­ple com­pli­ment you on it, you get to say you made it your­self. Isn’t that the best?!