When our fearless leader of Where Bloggers Live included the prompt “my art or collectibles”, I had the worst time figuring out how I could join in.

Why? Maybe because my biggest collectibles are ones you’ve already seen. My clothes (seen on my closet tour), my jewelry (shared with jewelry organization), and my yarn collection (found in my favorite things article).

And art? Yeah, that’s not something we focus on much in our household. Sure, we have canvas paintings, and some framed art in the house, but nothing that is truly meaninful. Until I remembered this!

Quote of the day: “If grass can grown through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.” Cher

If you get my email, then you already know this is one of only 2 times, I lied to my husband. More about that below.

Welcome to a small corner that connects the main house to the bedrooms. Here is where you would find the thermostat as well as the HVAC air filter (which is below the “photo” of us and cropped out of the image).

How do you like how we decorated around the thermostat so it’s not so obvious?

So back to the subject we are discussing. Art. There’s a story behind this “photo” and it’s a good one.

18 years ago right after we were married, one of my employees was talking about her friends that had this interesting business. They would take a photograph and create a paint-by-number kit for you.

Isn’t that such a cool idea?

Now I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to know that you can find this same thing on Amazon now. It looks like it’s very popular for your pets no less.

So as I was thinking about what to give to my new husband oodles of years ago, I decided that this would be a heartwarmly gift.

We had recently taken this photo (sorry this version is so blurry. I couldn’t find the original, and this was the one off the thumbnails sheet I found).
As you can see, it translated very well into a paint-by-numbers and looks just like the photo.

Since this was for Rob’s birthday, I couldn’t very well paint it at home. He was working at Hunter Douglas in the IT department, and my dental practice would be done seeing patients at 2:00 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was before my practice was super busy.

So I kept the kit at work and would work on it those afternoons before we would meet at home. I remember talking to Rob a couple of times while I was working on it, and he would ask what I was doing.
My reply “Just catching up on all kinds of work stuff” which was kinda true, right?

Most people aren’t even aware that the photo is a paint-by-number because it looks just like a black-and-white photo. That’s why I included the close-up below to show the texture and details.

Insider story: At this time my husband hadn’t whitened his teeth, and the numbers called for a much darker color for his teeth. Compared to how white mine were, it looked awful, so I just added a little more white paint when I filled in his smile!!

Now, I couldn’t very well just give him the canvas for his birthday, so I had it framed by one of my patients who worked out of his house.
There were so many mats and frames to choose from, and I decided to keep it dark and manly.

July 20th rolled around, and I presented this gift to Rob. He was very surprised and didn’t even realize it was a paint-by-number at first.
When he asked how I did it, I explained how I worked on it at my dental office.

And he was shocked that I lied to him, LOL! In my defense, it was a surprise, so that’s not really lying, right?

Our painted artwork hung in our living room for years and when we moved to our townhouse in Denver, it ended up in our master bedroom area.

Soon after we moved to our Arizona house and hung it where it is now, we woke up to a crash in the night. Somehow, the person who hung it (that would be me) hadn’t secured it well, and it came crashing down. Luckily no kitties were hurt.

You can see the damage that happened to the corner of the frame. Luckily the glass didn’t break and there was no damage to the floor. We discussed the possibility of reframing it, but I decided that it’s perfectly imperfect, just like us. So the cracked frame stays. Besides, did you even notice it in the larger photos above? Doubtful. Basically, it’s just like the scars on our body…we are the ones who obsess over it while no one else notices. (You knew I had to sneak in a little self-love and encouragement)

So there’s the story of the special art in our house and one of the two times I lied to my husband. All rolled into one blog post.

Where Bloggers Live

What is Where Bloggers Live? It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and hear all about the personal backstories and interesting details? Go take a gander at everyone else’s weekend version of a day in the life. This should be a good one.
FYI, we don’t all post at the same time since we all have different schedules and live in different parts of the country.

Bettye at Fashion Schlub
Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own

The Series

We’ve been doing this fun series for a long time as you can see by the prompts below. These are only from just the last year or so. Feel free to visit any that might strike your fancy.

Past Pets
Dream House
Favorite Piece of Furniture
Photo Album
Top 5 Favorite Movies
Memories of NYC Trips
Hairstyles from my Childhood
The Truth About How I Blog
A Day in the Life-Field Trip
Food: My 2 Favorite Gluten-Free Breakfast Options
Jewelry Organization
Favorite Bloggers
What’s in my Kitchen Pantry
My Favorite Website(s)
A Day in the Life: Weekend
Medicine Cabinet

Get the Inside Scoop

Following me on other social sites to gives you totally different outfits and perspectives about life (and it makes my day when you comment). It’s not all the same posts that you see here on the blog. You can find me on these platforms: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube.

I include some personal tidbits in these emails along with other happenings, sales, information, and links. So I hope you join me on this journey. Just add your email address to the box that says email below. 

You should definitely sign up for the emails below. Besides the free eBook, my email family gets personal tidbits of what’s going on in my life along with other happenings, sales, information, giveaways, extra photos, and interesting articles.

Welcome to Jodie’s Touch of Style. I’m here to prove that it’s never too late to look great. Clothing and style are meant to showcase your inner personality. So let’s have fun and try new things.

The post My Art Or Collectibles With Where Bloggers Live appeared first on Jodie’s Touch of Style.

Jodie Filogomo Fashion Stylist

Jodie's Touch of Style showcases how it's never too late to look great including other older women and myself talking about fashion, beauty, and lifestyle issues.

As a retired dentist, Jodie takes her love of clothing and shopping and has come to find her superpowers in styling the same item in many ways. She is also a huge advocate for embracing our age and bodies. Getting old is a wonderful thing and learning to love ourselves while it happens is very freeing.

Looking great can happen no matter what age, shape or budget, as we show on Jodie's Touch of Style.