Free DIY Wooden Frames

Growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I am mildly obsessed with the Sandia Mountains. These majestic mountains can be seen from literally every spot in the city. Just look east and there they are. After moving to the east coast ten years ago, I still find myself scanning the horizon for my mountains much like a toddler blindly reaches for her blanket in moments of stress.

When I went to college in Virginia, I tried to placate myself with photos of the mountains pasted on every inch of my cinder block dorm room. The above photo is actually a card that followed me to every dorm room and apartment until I graduated. For the past six years it's been in a box of mementos hidden from view because I now require my art framed instead of merely taped to the wall.

After finishing my take on the recent pallet art phenomenon (check it out here), I began brainstorming other ways of using paint stir sticks. With the help of my trusty miter saw I knew I could easily make a picture frame.

After few 45 degree angle cuts I had the beginnings of a frame.  I took the scraps of some stir sticks and used them to secure the sticks together at the angles with gorilla glue.

Voila!  A simple frame was created...for free!  Add some paint, glue on a sawtooth hanger, and throw in a picture - you've got yourself a piece of art worthy of more than a dorm room wall.

Now when I find myself homesick and needing some comfort, I can glance over at my mountains and feel a bit calmer.

Wood Plus Stain Equals Art Tutorial

I feel as though I could start every single post with the sentence, "I was looking at Pinterest recently and...."  I spend entirely too much time on that amazing site (by the way, check out my boards on pinterest) but I love being awed and wowed and inspired by the amazing things I see there. All summer I kept noticing fabulous art created by pallets people were finding. After staining them and painting quotes or silhouettes, those free pieces of wood became beautiful.

I was torn by these beauties. You see, I desperately wanted to make some art with wooden planks but, as a former manager of a store that used thousands of pallets a week, I saw what most planks are coated with, how unsanitary they are treated, and how disgusting many of them are. I did not want to bring disease-invested wood into our home so I decided to find another way to create some free wooden plank art.

Enter paint stir sticks. I had a handful of these awesome, crafty sticks leftover from a previous project and pulled them out of the closet. They were perfect for what I had in mind!

After cutting off the beveled edges and picking out the most interesting sticks, I was left with the perfect little square of wood.  Taking some leftover stain from our branch bench (check it out here), I stained each stick. I wanted to stain them separately rather than all together once they were attached to one another in order to get a varied and non-uniform stain. My goal was to make this look as rustic and plank-like as possible.

The stain went on beautifully - check out the personality that little paint stir sticks can have.

Once they were dry, I used gorilla glue to glue the scraps I had sawed off earlier. 

Waiting 2 hours for the glue to dry was torture but I used the time to decide what I wanted to paint on my lovely canvas.

Now I have my very own faux pallet art!  Oh, and while working with the paint stir sticks, I started a couple more projects...stay tuned to see what else I can make out of these free pieces of wood!

Sticks and Stones

Given my obsession with sticks, twigs, and branches it was only a matter of time until I created another piece of art with nature's free crafting supply.  While gluing sticks together for this project I found myself contemplating about my love of dead tree limbs tree branches.  I didn't come up with an answer, but I did come to appreciate their versatility and ability to become anything you want them to (including a focal point and flowers)

My vision began with this pile of sticks on our balcony.  I sanded them lightly to create a worn look and broke them into smaller pieces.

After playing around, I found that I enjoyed the whimsical shape of the heart paired with the rustic quality of the sticks.  Simple but texturally interesting.

Sometimes I wonder if a home can have too many dead trees twigs but I highly doubt it. Nature, in any form, is beautiful.

DIY Art by the Inartistic

Yesterday I was having a conversation about some of the art I've shown on the blog.  While gathering and collecting enough art for our gallery wall, we had to get creative when it came to accumulating pieces that were personal and budget-friendly.  John and I love art and have very similar tastes in paintings, unfortunately we don't have the wallet that reflects artistic tastes. We are lucky to have several amazing pieces of art hanging in our home - our very first watercolor splurge that we purchased on our honeymoon to remember it by, a piece painted for us as a gift, and a wonderful little watercolor also purchased for us as a gift.

When it came to growing our collection and creating a gallery wall of photos, art, and sentimental tidbits, we knew we couldn't continue to splurge and would have to find a way to bring art that we loved into a budget-friendly project.  I thought I'd show some of our favorite framed pieces that we made for less than $.50 each and with little required artistic ability.

There are some diy art projects that I've seen that just blow me away - and also make me feel inadequate and lacking in the artistic department. My hope is that you'll see that all you need is a ruler, perhaps some scissors to make a stencil and you can have some beautiful art. 

I wrote about this LOVE piece here where I explained how I traced the LOVE off the computer and used it as a stencil to make something simple, but pretty.

I made this round frame during my styrofoam upcycle project but filled it with a pretty little bird I found on google images and printed off.

This frame is also handmade out of cardboard and filled with a silhouette of our family that I drew.

 Stryofoam also helped to make this patterned H.

I found this cute frame at Goodwill, painted it, and decided to fill it with a simple pencil drawing.  Looking around google images once again for inspiration. This time, however, I drew it myself but I'm sure it would look just as well printed out.

During a day trip to the beach I collected these sweet, smooth stones from the sand. When I got home I was struck by the romantic gray and whites and glued them to a piece of cardstock. Simple.

So, that is how a very inartistic person such as myself created many pieces of art.

Yellow Blossoms

I love nature. I love nature so much that last month I found a tree branch, spray painted it, and hung it up in my living room. Remember, though, how it was missing something so I whipped up some origami leaves? They were nice for a couple weeks, but then the bold, modernism made me tired so I started looking for other branch-sprucing options.  With my mind focused on flowers, both real and otherwise, this week, I decided to try my hand at paper flowers. We needed something pretty, summery, and colorful to replace the leaves and I think I found them!

I started out with some scrap cardstock and a variety of fun scissors.

Drawing a spiral, I cut it out. I got a little experimental with the scalloped scissors.  I decided I'd try a variety of made up flower techniques to see what I liked and didn't like.

After cutting out the spiral, I took the outer end piece and  started rolling. I tried the inner end piece and that didn't work very well...so stick with the outer end.

I found that if I rolled it tightly and then gently let it go when I finished, the flower blossomed very nicely

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I also took a long strip of paper and cut it into fringe to roll up.

Then I used my pencil to curl the fringe down and make into a flower-like shape.

Falling in love with all the flowers I couldn't pick my favorite style so I did something bold. I decided to use them all. I know, I know. A branch with three different flowers? Let's see how it looks.

I like the yellow against the green and it's nice to bring in some new color to the blue and greens of the living room.

 Much better than those leaves! Don't worry, I saved them and may bring them back out in the fall. I'm liking the simplicity of the small yellow blooms...what do you think?

Gallery Wall Remix

One of my favorite things about our new apartment is the gallery wall above our long two-person desk.  I love staring at it while sitting at the computer and reminiscing about the photographs or post cards or art we've hung up. Sometimes I found myself walking into the office just to look.

BEFORE

Lately, though, we've been accumulating some new pieces of art we wanted to add to the wall.  We initially hung everything thinking we'd just add onto it as we wanted, however most of our new pieces are larger and would look funky added on top or to the side of the gallery wall...they needed to be incorporated well. That last sentence may have been thought inside my head and not shared with my husband...which might explain the shock and surprise from John.

While John was in class I took everything off the wall and laid it all out on the floor....he was pretty taken back when he came home and couldn't walk into the office. As he realized he'd have to rehang everything, he looked pretty glum.

Our office looked like this for several weeks as we gained the energy to tackle the wall.

 We finally tackled the daunting task a few weeks ago and once again have a fabulous gallery wall (with the help of Layla-Butt, of course).

 Our goal was to bring some more color to the wall so the pictures were the focus instead of the mismatched frames.

AFTER

We did this by incorporating a few bold colors (like the robins egg, pink, and yellow) throughout the new art pieces.  Notice our LOVE painting is the same color as the frames that are in each section of the wall. We also placed the sunset in the lower center with a flower of the same color in the upper center to bring focus to those colors.

As we were collecting art and pictures to hang up, we got creative with the frames by making some of our own out of styrofoam (you can read about that here, here, and here) and cardboard.  Can you see the handmade frames?

 We are in love with our remixed gallery wall.  The large scale of the gallery adds more interest than before (which helps because our office is pretty bare) and the pops of color help balance out the large white desk we made and the large brown bookshelf that also resides in the room.

I'm so glad I got over my initial fear of creating a gallery wall - now we have a place for all of our fun art and pictures and nothing is hiding under the bed or couches due to no wall space.

Upcycling Project: Part 2

Remember a long time ago when I shared that instead of throwing away a styrofoam cooler, I was trying to upcycle every inch of styrofoam from it? Well, let me show you some more projects I made from it!

As I've been sharing, John and I are trying to fill out our re-hung gallery wall (it will be revealed this week, I promise!) and I thought I'd see how well styrofoam worked as a homemade frame.

I love the way this frame turned out: it's rustic, imperfect, and beautiful in my mind.  I took some recycled wrapping paper and mod podged it onto the styrofoam circle, then cut out of cardstock a mat and framed a printed out picture of a bird.  I love it.

Here's another frame I made - this time I tried paper maching it to add strength and texture.  It only needed one layer of paper mache and it became much stronger.  Add some paint and voila!

Stay tuned for a few more styrofoam upcycling projects! I'm a little in love with this cheap, light-weight material that does not belong in a landfill and cost me absolutely nothing.



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Five Minute Art Alert

Welcome to another episode of Five Minute Crafting with Kristen (see episode 1, episode 2).  We've been slowly adding to our gallery wall (an updated reveal is coming soon) and while watching a movie last night I decided to whip up some new five minute art.

Using some scraps of pretty paper, I cut out butterflies and glued them onto a painted cardboard lid.  Voila!

This has been another episode of "Five Minute Crafting with Kristen."