Pedicures & Powertools: Wedding Picture Frames

My wedding is now four months away and I haven't really given a lot of thought to it.

Scratch that--I've given thought to it but not a lot of action.

Then I finally decided to start doing something. So I put together a centerpiece that I'm going to use.

While searching Pinterest; I came across this photo of an easy DIY centerpiece that I decided I wanted to recreate.

But there wasn't an affiliated link attached to it!

I'm not sure if I just found a bad posting of it or if there isn't one created somewhere, but I did a little finagling of my own to recreate this project.

The first thing I did was order a bulk order to matte frames. I got my to fit 4x6 photos and did a mixture of black and white. If I were to do this again I would definitely get only white. I didn't realize at the time that the black would not be painted over so well.

You could, of course, leave them black or white or even order them in specific colors but I didn't find any in my wedding colors and I wanted something that would pop.

The colors for my wedding are navy and hot pink so I picked up a bottle of spray paint for each.

Sonic Happy Hour gets me through a lot in life

In the garage, on a nice cool day, I laid down a large plastic sheet (which I'd used previously to paint the TV Console and laid each of the matte's down individually to paint. They took about two coats and I waited a couple hours in between both (mostly because the smell was strong and mostly because I wanted to be double sure it was dry).

After 1 coat

I finished with more Navy than Pink

Once they were dried I brought everything inside and collected my materials.

You will need:
3 mattes per centerpiece
3 photos per centerpiece
glue gun and glue sticks

If you create an account with Shutterfly.com you can get 50 free photos! I will have about 25 tables at my wedding so I needed about 75 photos total in order to make one per table. With the 50 free photos I only had to buy around 25 more photos.

I love Shutterfly because the quality of their photos is phenomenal and they're always sending coupons/codes for free items. I was able to get quite a lot of Christmas presents spread out over several months by using their free codes.

The first step is to glue the photos to the back of each matte board. To do this, flip the matte board to the wrong side (i.e. the side that you don't want showing) and put a drop of glue on each corner.

I put these fairly close to the opening because I wanted to be sure my photos fit.

Once you've done that, attach the photo you want to use, facing down.

After the glue has dried, flip them over to see your product.

I chose a mixture of photos that my fiance and I have taken over the last several months. Originally I was going to wait until after our next session of engagement photos were taken (our first session got sleeted out so we did a mini bookstore session) but I got on a roll with gluing the photos down and didn't save any for later.

Continue gluing the pictures to the backside of the matte boards.

Half finished stack

Finished stacks

Once you've gotten all the matte boards done it's time for assembling the centerpieces.

To do this: take two matte boards at a time and place them together vertically.

Put a line of glue on the inside of the matte boards and hold them in place until dried. Make sure you put the glue on the inside! Globs of glue will appear if you do it on the outside, learned this lesson the hard way.

Once the first two matte boards are attached, glue the third down in the same way. To do the final side, put a line of glue on the inside of one matte board and then press the final sides together.