Picture Frames Without The Frame

Time really does go fast. It's hard to believe that it has been about a year since I've written anything in my blog. A lot has happened since then; I took a new position at a different institution, and I bought a house, among a lot of other not so major changes. I did it all within a matter of months, which I have found is generally how things happen. ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Needless to say, I wasn't blogging much before all that chaos started anyway-so I'm going to try to start again. And just in case you were wondering I'm loving my new coworkers and I'm loving my new house. At some point I will write a blog post about all the things I learned when purchasing a house that's for sale by owner. However, I got to say it was rather easy. Easier than I thought it would ever be. Sign here, sign there. Show me where all your money comes from. Bam, you got a house.

Moving on. I've been messing around with watercolors and wanting something to display them or pictures I've taken. With that in mind, I went searching around for what I had on hand and for some inspiration on pinterest. And this is what I ended up doing.

All I needed were these few supplies and some scrap pieces of wood. I happen to have these pieces laying around. My dad brings them home with him from work and then I steal them. They happen to also be very good for starting fires-so I steal them a lot.

Anyway, I  sanded them down slightly by hand with fine grit sand paper. I stained them using the minwax stain shown above. Most of my floors and baseboards are all stained dark, so I kept with the trend. I smothered on lots of wood glue (and I mean lots) and pressed the wood pieces together. I let them dry over night, while clamped together tightly. Side note: I left them dry overnight on newspaper. Seemed like a perfect idea at the time, but some of the glue seeped through; gluing the newspaper to the wood. I spent the next day peeling the paper off the wood-not so good idea anymore; I'm pretty good at those. Lastly, I just attached a picture frame bracket with two finishing nails in the back and hot glued the twine around the top and bottom.

I used two small clothespins to hang the watercolor "paintings" to the twine and hung them right up on the wall. The wood I used is very light, so they didn't require anything special to hang them. And ta-da, picture "frames." You can see that the edges are not perfect or lined up exactly. I actually enjoy that fact, but who has time for that perfection nonsense anyway?




I hope their simplicity inspires someone to make "picture frames" of their own.  I'm so inspired I think I'm going to go enjoy a nice cup of hot tea, the rainy night and the new genetics textbook-unfortunately it's only rain. No snow.