Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

Building Good Looking Wooden Photo Frames For Your Own Use

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Everyone who is interested in art knows that wooden photo frames can be expensive when purchased in a store. But what if you want an attractive wooden photo frame that competes with the big boys while offering you a huge price savings?

Here are the steps to making your own wooden picture frame. Follow these and before long you’ll have a great looking frame built to the size you want.

(1)First of all, make sure you measure the mat. The size of your artwork isn’t as important – if you cut your wood according to the size of the art, you’re going to end up with an overly tiny frame. Believe it or not, this step is skipped fairly frequently, or just done wrong. Feel free to measure more than once. This is the time you want to find discrepancies in your measurements, rather than after you’ve already cut everything and have invested time and money into building a wooden picture frame.

(2)Buy the corresponding amount of lumber as per the measurements you took in step one. Begin cutting. Make sure to keep those measurements in mind as you go along, because you’re not going to get another shot at cutting. The lumber should be divided into four pieces, each section is the complete length added the width of the wood multiply by two.

(3)Trim each edge to a nice forty five degree angle. When you’ve accomplished this step, you can assemble your wooden photo frame on a tabletop. If it’s not looking perfect at this point, don’t worry over much. You still have time left to sand down any imperfections that might appear. If it looks big, get your saw back out and start cutting.

(4)Sand down all the pieces when the cutting process is done for good. Try using a belt sander for best results, and remember that you want your frame to be a work of art on its own. Don’t settle for a shaggy looking wooden rectangle.

(5)Glue the angled tips of the wooden pieces and use clamps to keep applying pressure. There is going to be some waiting time here, so go find something else to do while you wait for your wooden picture frame to settle.

(6)Drive some V nails into each of the sides, one facing in and one out. This will make sure your frame stays together even if your glue job fails. It won’t be a permanent fix, but it’ll keep the shape you wanted long enough to re-glue your project.

(7)Remove all the clamps and allow your wooden picture frame to dry. It should be able to sit at least until tomorrow morning, at which time your wooden picture frame should be dry. This is your last shot at perfecting your picture frame, so sand off any remaining edges that are scruffy now, then apply some stain if you’d like a different color than natural wood.

Though wooden photo frames might be expensive in the store, they’re plenty affordable to create yourself. Go with the steps listed above and build yourself a beautiful wooden photo frame that is just as cool looking as anything you’ll find at your local hobby store.

If you’re looking for wooden photo frames for your personalized photo albums, there’s no better place to look better than the web if you want the absolute lowest prices. Ready to buy one today? Buy all your framing equipment from an online retailer that you can trust to make sure you get quality goods at the cheapest prices available.