I found out that my roommate enjoys scavenging for stuff he can put in our apartment. He found a tube full of posters near the back of our complex. A bunch were of Marilyn Monroe but we ended up not using them. We did find however, these really neat copies of drawings someone did of the Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame in Paris, France. I can’t really make out the signature but all I know is that she made some amazing art.
We decided we wanted to put them in our living room since our walls were pretty bare. The pictures were rolled up in the tube so we flattened them out by putting some heavy books on them. We then went to look for some picture frames. IKEA is the place to go for these things. The frames we got had glass and were only $10 each! We had trouble deciding on a color for the frame so it would match our pictures. We ended up picking a silver frame, which turned out really neat. As I was trying to put the first picture in, I accidentally broke the glass, so I went to Target with my parents and got a $6 cheap frame with plastic on the inside that we were able to use for the front. So one of them, which you can’t see from the picture, has plastic in front of the picture, which is a lot lighter in terms of weight.
Here’s the frame before we put anything in it:
There were little tabs on the inside all around the frame that held everything in place. My Dad helped me center the pictures in the frame and tape it down so it wouldn’t move when we went to put the cardboard on top. Then we used a screwdriver to push the tabs down to make sure they were nice and tight.
The IKEA frames also came with a backing, so we placed the pieces on opposing sides and strung the wire through it and twisted the ends around so it would have extra tension:
We went to Home Depot to get pieces to hang our frames. I believe it was a small 2 piece set that held up to 30 pounds or so which was way more than we needed. But here’s pictures of the frames when they were done and hung:
They look pretty professional to me. I’m planning on painting some pictures to frame and fill the other empty whiteness of our walls. Hopefully when winter break comes around I’ll have more time to do so. These were great finds in terms of pictures and I’m glad we get to admire them every day.
Happy framing!(:
Engineer with a Twist 