Patriotic Picture Frames

Shortly after Christmas, I picked up several wooden frames just because they were on clearance cheap. They were destine for craft stash, but ended up in the floor of my craft room. This week, I got tired of tripping over them and decided to create something for my summer decorating theme.

There’s all sorts of summer decorating themes… beach and fruit are two of the most popular. I go a different direction. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, my interior decorating them is patriotic. By decorating around a patriotic theme, I cover all of the major summer holidays – Memorial Day, Fouth of July and even Flag Day.
For this framing project I drew inspiration from my Texas Star and Rustic Valentine. I also was able to use a lot of the crafting supplies leftover from those projects, including the paint, the small star cut outs and the wooden lettering, which coincidently are patriotic colors. I had a pile of kid and grandkid photos that would fit into the theme as well.

First I match the frames to the photos. Then I matched the paint to the colors or theme in the photo. For the baseball photo, I painted the frame Texas Ranger red. The other photos seemed to work best with the bright blue. I painted all of the frames at once, and allowed them to dry.

While the frames dried, I sorted through my leftover letters to spell out something that made sense. “Made in Texas” and “My Airman” were obvious – and I was lucky enough to have all the letters I needed. “USA” was easy as well, but picking out something baseball-y, well that required the assistance of John. For two or three days, we struggled with words. John desperately wanted to spell out “Slugger,” but I didn’t have all the required letters – and I was determined to use up what I had rather than buy more. Then we tried “First Base,” and “Coach.” Finally John pieced together “Homerun” and that fit!

We used silver metatic acrylic craft paint on the pre-cut wood letters and some of the small pre-cut stars and bright red on larger pre-cut stars I purchased at Michael’s. Once dry, about six hours, I glued the letters stars to the frame using wood glue. When the glue had set up, about two hours, I sealed the whole thing by painting it with a layer of white craft glue and let it dry overnight.

Once the frames were dry, I trimmed the photos to fit inside the frames and then using masking tape, sealed the backsides so the photos could be handled without falling out.