Monday, October 17, 2011

Framed pt.2

Alright, back to that picture frame! (for a complete up-to-date-briefing, check out pt.1 over here).

I may have failed to mention in the previous post that when I purchased this frame from the vintage fair, I literally purchased just the frame- no hardware. no glass. none of that good stuff. Having already splurged $20 on the frame itself, I was wanting to do the rest on the cheap (or free, if possible).

Step 1 was to find some sort of glass or protective coating to put in front of the picture in the frame. Plexiglass was $2 at work. done. I figured I'd have to cut it to size (and was highly dreading the task), but I bought a sheet, took it home, and - I kid you not- it fit perfectly into the frame! It was a DIY dream come true!

With the inserted plexi, I was working with a 1/4 of an inch of space to fill in the back so the picture and plexi would fit tight when hung. I found a sheet of cardboard, cut it to size, and was still left with about an 1/8" of space. I turned the place upside down in search of more cardboard, and turned up empty handed! I probably could've waited until morning to get another piece, but I was on a roll, and improvised- I cut up strips of card stock and glued them in strips to achieve my desired thickness. Brilliant, right? To hold it all together, I mounted 4 L-brackets - one in each corner, and attached some picture hanging wire, and the frame itself was ready to mount! ta-da!

While Jackie was hanging the frame, Hazel wanted to
get in on the action- here she is in her mini Home Depot
apron with a sponge hammer toy! So rad!

We figured that the best location for the frame would be on the left side of our massive living room window, against the pink wall. We now had to choice what sort of image we would want framed. For a long time, we've discussed getting a giant picture of Hazel- potentially in black and white. We went through every single picture of her, and finally decided on a recent one- it's a picture of her, trying on her grandma's glasses- and grandma took the picture quickly with her iPhone. It's very cute and quirky. Jackie used a site called Picnik to edit it a bit (try it out- it's free!) and ended up doing a black and white filter, with just a few subtle colored highlights. Lesson learned with this project: iPhones don't take gallery-quality photos (at least, not when blown up to 11 x 14 size). Up close, it's kind of pixelated, but we'll mostly be viewing it at a distance anyway.

All in all, I'm really satisfied with this project, and am very proud to be an owner of an embellished frame. And the picture of Hazel is pretty awesome too.

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