Fireplace Decor

We've been living in this house since the end of January and we couldn't decide what to put over our mantle.  It has been said that there are enough mirrors on the first floor, so that option was out.  When we first moved in, my mom put up some Valentine's decor from my best friend Annie.

While I really like this as an accent piece, it didn't really do the fireplace justice.  So, I was set on finding just the right piece.  Over the next few months, I looked at magazines and blogs for ideas, but couldn't really find anything that I LOVED.  (Yes, I have to LOVE it if it's really going to stay in my house.) As I looked at the fireplace, I didn't really like that the whole wall was brown even though there was clearly trim above the mantle. 

This is a picture taken before we moved in.  As you can see, the entire wall above the fireplace is brown.  Yuck! After a few months, I decided to paint the trim around the wall.  

Look past the ugly white chair... which is another post...and to the top left.  The trim is painted white, but something still isn't right.  I then decided to paint the entire box above the fireplace white.  I don't have a picture of this, but it looked much better.  A little while later, I found this amazing piece of wood art at http://lemontreecreations.blogspot.com/2010/07/wooden-tree-wall-art.html   (This is one of my favorite blogs!)  As soon as I saw it, I knew that this was the perfect piece for this space.  I searched on craigslist and found a guy that made me this 4x2 piece of wood for $25.  

I then added a few coats of high gloss polyurethane to darken up the wood.  

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The ladies at lemon tree love cuttingedgestencils.com/ so I decided to check them out.  I found this stencil (similar to the one used on their blog) at cutting edge and was able to get 20% off by signing up for their email.  

After finding my stencil, I went to Hobby Lobby and found 3 metallic acrylic paints to layer on to the wood.  

 I overlapped some of the edges so that it didn't look to picture perfect.  

 This is the finished product!!  

 Notice how the different colors are picked up depending on the angle of the light.  

Let's just say I LOVE it!!