Savin' Maven Monday: DIY Hand Crafted Picture Frames

Happy Monday!!!

I hope you all had a great weekend. Mine was very productive. I don't think I left the house all weekend, except to mail customer orders from my shop. That means, I did absolutely no shopping. And you have NO idea how hard that was for me.

Forcing myself to stay in the house wasn't actually that bad at all-it gave me a chance to deep clean my house as well as get some decorating and DIY projects done.

In case you don't know, I'm very much into taking pictures-not just for blogging purposes-but also for the memories. I'm always the girl with the camera at any family function or event that goes down.  With that being said, I have tons of photo prints laying around my house. So when I saw craft frames at Michael's for $.50 I knew I had to have them for my gallery wall.

I figured that hand crafted frames would add personality to my wall, rather than having a bunch of 'blahzay' frames hanging without purpose.

Here's what I used to complete my hand crafted frame project:

-6 wooden craft frames
-Acrylic craft paint (I used a slate grey and black)
-newspaper (to protect your work surface)
-a medium size craft brush
-Black/grey sharpies
-Mod Podge (not pictured)
-Painter's tape (not pictured)

That's it! You're ready to begin.

Use your craft brush to paint the blank frames with two coats of your chosen acrylic paint color(s).

I painted 3 of them grey and 3 of them black so that I could alternate designs.

Allow approximately 2 hours to dry. Then, use the painters tape to section off each frame according to how you would like them designed-I chose polka dots, cheveron, stripes, and some randomly abstract lattice design.

The first frame design, which happened to be the polka dots, turned out to be my favorite! I used the sticks that came with the frames to create the dots like so...

I coated the remaining frames with two coats of an alternating color. For example, the frames that were originally based with grey paint, got covered with black paint and vice versa. The additional coats were left for another 2 hours to dry. Once the painters tape was removed, they looked like this...

I then used Sharpies to clean up the lines a little bit.

Allow the 'cleaned up' lines to dry then paint each frame with a coat of Mod Podge to seal your job and create a semi-glossy finish.

Here are my completed frames...

Being the frugalista that I am, I only order picture prints when I find deals where I can get them for FREE so that's how I ended up with the pictures. Be sure to 'like' my FB Page so you can get in on the freebies too!

All in all, I spent about $10 on this project. I am super excited about how well they turned out and I can't wait to share my full gallery with you all.

Does this inspire you to hand craft some of your own frames? I totally hope so;-)

Thanks so much for reading!

XOXOXOXOXO

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