Crafting with Leftovers

I love it when my mom comes to visit, because she often comes bearing gifts. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, those gifts are home-related. A few months ago, she came through with some garage-sale finds, including this lovely framed portrait of…some flowers:

She picked it up with the understanding I’d probably change out the contents, because hey, a frame’s a frame. Figuring I’d get inspired enough to do so, I happily accepted.

After stalling for months because I couldn’t figure out what images I’d want to put in the 8” x 10” mats, the proverbial light bulb appeared over my head this afternoon and I decided to get to work. And because I am lazy resourceful, I flipped this cheap find completely with stuff I happened to have around the house.

For the images themselves, I decided to isolate an illustration I found on iStockPhoto.com when I was hunting around for artwork to use for my wedding invites. Wanting to use something nature-inspired, I had stumbled upon this graphic:

...and fallen in love with it. I bought it without knowing how I’d use it, and sadly, it turned out I couldn’t. I tried to make one of the elements work, but it ended up relegated to the programs in favor of some more elegant scrollwork on the invitations themselves.

But I still love the image, so I popped open Illustrator this afternoon and pulled out the second and third trees, sized them to fit the mats, and isolated them in black on white. I printed them on our home printer on the linen-textured paper I had left over from our wedding programs, to surprisingly good results. (Pro-tip: Changing print quality settings from “fast draft” to “best” makes a big difference here.)

In addition to changing out the images, I knew I’d want to lose the gold mat between the ivory mat and the existing photos. I cracked open the frame and was pleased to find that the gold mat was a stand-alone and not fused to the white mat as I had feared. Using some paint that was left over from when I painted over the forest-green accents (hello ‘90s!) on our dining room furniture, I slapped two quick coats on the gold mat. I really only needed about ¼” of the border around the opening to be black, but I painted the whole thing just in case someday I (or my future garage sale patrons) need a black photo mat with two 8” x 10” openings.

Once I got into the guts of the frame, I discovered the floral images were in fact wallpaper, which had been scotch-taped to the backing of the frame. It's easily been a good 15 years since that wallpaper could have been in style, so I felt good in the knowledge that this already-DIYed ensemble had lived a full life and was ready to move on.

After the paint dried and I got everything re-assembled, I was pretty pleased with the end result:

Simple, but contemporary, and a little personalized too. Start-to-finish time: Less than an hour. Cost to me: Nada. If this is crafting, sign me up!