Nothing transforms a house into a home faster than decorating it with family photos. Whether it is a wall collage of your child’s school portraits, a hall lined with photos of family gatherings, or a refrigerator plastered with individual shots of memorable moments, nothing says “home” like wonderfully rich family photographs.
Our home is littered with pictures… and I mean that quite literary. Currently, our living room floor looks like a photo processing machine threw up on it. There are dozens of photos scattered on the carpet—the remnants of an art project my daughter and I undertook this afternoon. I will be perfectly honest, I am no crafty Cathy, but I couldn’t resist taking advantage of the terrific back-to-school bargains that are being offered at practically every store—including our local craft store, which is currently selling wooden picture frames for less than a dollar each.
Guess what everyone in our family will be getting for Christmas? That’s right, the perfect decoration for any room—a customized picture frame—made by their favorite toddler. I may be not be a craft queen, but in the eyes of my 2-year-old, anyone who can produce cookie sheets filled with glitter, alphabet stickers, cotton balls and glue is in the running to be the next Martha Stewart. Needless to say, you don’t have to possess any of Martha’s talent to pull off this picture project. We had a blast simply using the aforementioned supplies.
It was very simple. I spelled out “grandma” and “grandpa” in glue on the frames and my daughter joyously dipped them into the glitter. We then embellished them with flower stickers, animal stickers and added an “I LOVE YOU” with alphabet stickers. For the uncles we glued cotton balls onto the frames and sprinkled them with glitter too. Some frames were decorated with “cotton” clouds, while others had “cotton” flowers. The frame we made for my daughter’s cousin featured “cotton” candy—it will display a picture of the two of them sharing the real thing at a carnival we attended together this summer. Half the fun was choosing the picture to add to the finished frame. We tried to stick with a photo that would match the frame’s theme. For example, the cotton candy frame was a perfect fit for the cotton candy picture and the cotton cloud frame embellished with sticker kites complimented a picture I took of my daughter and her uncle at a recent kite show we attended.
My daughter had an incredible time decorating the frames and with a little luck the finished products will be cherished by all the recipients. Decorative frames—it’s a wonderful way to proudly display your favorite Kodak moments and even better way to help make a house a home.