Hot 4 Hybrid – Altered Frame
Hey there Sweet Shoppers! Jen Tapler here bringing you another installment of your weekly Hot 4 Hybrid post. This week I thought I’d share with you a fun little keepsake altered project I whipped up this past weekend using Dani’s Take Me Away kit and a super cheap wooden frame I picked up at K-Mart for about $4. I wanted to create a fun way to display my current favorite photo of my son Dean at the beach – making it easy to swap it out for a new one as my favorite seems to change as often as we go to the beach (which is about once a week)! I took a few photos of my process and I’ll briefly explain what I did, then show you the finished project, which I LOVE by the way!!
First I gathered all of my supplies – I painted the bare wood frame with a coat of white acrylic paint and used Mod Podge to attach the Woodgrain patterned paper to the front. The outer edge of the frame measured about 9.75×7.75 inches, which is the size I created the Woodgrain paper before printing. I sized all of the elements and alphas appropriately as well. I knew I wanted to include a couple of surfboards, but there weren’t any in Dani’s kit. No worries – I used a couple of the surfboard images from the Life’s a Beach kit by Shawna, Melissa and Libby as clipping masks to create coordinating surfboards for my project!! (There’s no rules against that, right? LOL). Once I had everything sized appropriately, I printed it all out on a couple of sheets of 8.5×11 inch matte presentation paper.
After all of the papers and elements were printed, I started cutting! I started with the Woodgrain paper for the front of the frame, cutting it to the correct 9.75×7.75 inches. I then measured in 2 inches from each edge of that and cut the “hole” for the photo before gluing the paper onto the front of the frame with Mod Podge.
I then used various types of adhesive including liquid adhesive, Mini Glue Dots, and 3-dimensional foam adhesive to attach all of the printed embellishments and alpha to the front of the frame. The finished project has lots of depth and dimension thanks to that 3-D adhesive! Then I added my current favorite photo of Dean at the beach!!
And there you have it! I have an adorable (if I do say so myself) photo keepsake that I can save for myself or give as a gift – it cost less than $10 for all of the supplies and it took less than 2 hours to create start to finish. These altered keepsake projects are one of my favorite types of hybrid projects to create – not only are they lots of fun, but there is so much special meaning behind them. And this project in particular could easily be recreated with different themes and kits for a variety of photo memories – Holiday, Travel, Birthday, Graduation, Baby, the list just goes on and on! I especially love the idea of using these for gift-giving!!
