Hope everyone had a lovely holiday weekend! Our local fireworks this year were close enough to walk to, so we invited a few friends over for burgers and fruit flag:

Then we waited until the last possible minute to let the heat die down some before heading down the road to find a fireworks viewing spot:

And then we got right back to the business of finishing up Abe’s National Parks room.

I remember the days when filling up the walls in Abe’s room intimidated me. But that was back when it was an ocean-inspired room; I think I could keep filling up National Parks room walls forever. But I won’t because I’m all finished! Out of wall!

To review, he has a big bison print from World Market over his dresser, a vintage school map on another wall and a diy National Parks logo chalkboard, his book ledges, a See America postcard banner, and a trio of See America prints.

And now…..a gallery wall above his chalkboard:

I could have just filled all four walls with gallery if I’d wanted to, because I found two great sources of free printables that fit in perfectly in this room, and it was hard to pick just a few things to print.

So I’ll share the sources for the printables first and then give a run down of everything that’s on the wall.

1. FreeVintagePosters.com

I think this one is fairly well known in the world of free printables. I’ve looked at it dozens of times, but this is the first time I’ve had a project that was a good fit for it. As the name suggests, they have all sorts of free vintage posters, in high resolution, that you can download and use for free. You can spend the rest of your life (or at least, say, your week) browsing here and find tons and tons and tons of awesome stuff, but for Abe’s room I was interested in the old National Parks posters they have. I believe these are all ones that were done by artists working for the Works Project Administration in the 30’s.

I did a search for “national park” on the site, and it brought up several to choose from. Like this Yellowstone one:

Or this Sequoia National Park one that I nearly chose for Abe’s room:

I ended up going with one that wasn’t from a specific park, though, since we already have so many things like that from See Amercia. Also, we have bears and bison, but no deer yet in his room. And we like deer:

2. David Rumsey Map Collection

This one was new to me when a friend posted an article about it on Facebook a few months back. There are lots of sources of vintage maps floating around, but this one interested me because it has a number of old pictorial maps from some of the National Parks. These ones from Shenandoah and Cape Cod almost made the cut for Abe’s room, but ultimately we went with these two super fun and colorful maps from Mt. McKinley and Yosemite, both from the 30’s. I can’t quite get over how much I love them. So much whimsy!

A couple of notes about printing these out. I used photo paper in my printer and adjusted the settings to high quality (I accidentally printed them out without changing the settings at first; it makes a HUGE difference). Downloading from Free Vintage Posters was fairly straightforward, but, as far as I can tell, you can only download in JP2 format from the Rumsey map collection site. My computer didn’t like this format, so I used an online converter to change them to pngs before I could print them (just google “online jp2 converter”).

And now on to the rest of the wall!

I ordered 8×10 prints of two of my favorite photos of Abe at NPS sites. This one from the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, which we visited when he was about 18 months old, so before he even had his own Scottie in real life:

And at Fort Pulaski last November:

My friend Kristi found the bighorn sheep for Abe at the thrift store awhile back:

The Where the Wild Things Are inspired print made it over from his old gallery wall; it was a download I bought from Olive and Birch on Etsy awhile back.

And, finally, the Seek Adventure print is a Target Pillowfort find. They have another really cute one, too–a nighttime scene that reads, “move mountains”–but it wasn’t in stock at any of my local Targets, and I was too impatient to wait for it to get here in the mail.

We’re ridiculously close to calling this room finished. I have one more small project to finish up, and then it will be room reveal time. Next week? I think next week.

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