Freeze Frame

A few years ago my  baby brother (all of six feet and several pounds of him. "Baby" is a relative term here) made me picture frames for Christmas, and we used them, standard-style: one large picture per frame, parents and children. Ho hum. Until we had another child, and then another, and suddenly there weren't enough frames to use them as I had been doing, and into the studio (hahahahaha) they went.

They've languished there long enough, I think, so I pulled them out to put them to new use. I wanted something to lend some interest to a long stretch of wall going up the stairs, but I didn't want anything standard: no 8x10 photos, no self-portraits, no silhouettes. I wanted something that could be changed easily, because the one constant of children is that there is no constant.

In our family room we have a LARGE fabric-covered bulletin board. Four feet by eight feet large. It dominates the wall over the couch, and I love that I can pin stuff up there, rearrange it, and pull it down without committing pin marks to eternity. So why not so the same thing in miniature?

Our bulletin board is made of sound board. We got it at Home Depot, and it's relatively inexpensive, and
I had some scraps left over. It is, however, a royal messy pain in the patoot to cut. (It might have helped to have done so with a saw, but all I had were a utility knife--wholly inadequate, and a bread knife--which will never be the same again.) The debris field was significant.

After I roughly--very roughly--cut the sound board to fit the frames, I covered each one with a scrap of fabric (no shortage of that around here, no matter how much I use or give away), and secured them with staples. Then I inserted the boards into the frames, set them in with more staples (nit a permanent job, but I might want to reuse them later on.), attached hanging hardware, and put them up.

I like them even without the photos--sort of abstract art-inspired. But I eventually put pictures in, using silver thumb tack, applied so the tacks don't puncture the pictures, but just "push" them securely to the board. That way I can change the pictures at will, without making holes in something I might actually scrapbook if I suffer major brain trauma that alters my personality and I start doing such things.

(Wasn't Miss Elle sweet as a baby? They all start out that way. Fakers!)

I have room on each frame to add another picture, and the freedom to re-arrange the pictures as often as I like. Frugality and freedom--good things come in alliterative pairs.