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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Duh Origami Frame


In our old house up in the mountains, the inner walls were made of plaster, so yeah I went a little crazy hanging pictures on the walls. I just needed screws and a little manual screwdriver and I was all set. There were pictures from the kitchen to the bathroom. Most of them were just prints I cut out from calendars (I had a Van Gogh collection one, so see above...) or books (I had a Victorian planner as a child, which I didn't appreciate then of course - from there I cut out whole page illustrations of tea time scenes and seaside vacations...) or postcards (these actually didn't need cutting). I also hung mardi gras masks, tassels, and other trinkets. In our apartment now, the walls are made of cement (or concrete - I don't really know about these things) so it's not as easy to drill holes. Naturally, my pictures have been gathering dust in storage boxes and my walls have remained bare save for a poster here and there (enough for some people, but not for me). Anyway, I thought maybe I could take the prints out of their frames and just put them in paper ones I can tape to the wall. I'm not about to go out and buy paper frames because I'm a true cheapskate, so I've been googling instructions to make paper picture frames and found this and this. The first one was square and didn't suit most of my prints. The second one had a stand so it didn't suit either. I saw rectangle frames here, but I couldn't find instructions. Anyway, after days of experimenting, I finally came up with this. It's so simple; it must be a kindergarten project, lol. I really feel silly about the twisting and cutting and gnashing of teeth I had done to adjust the square pattern into a rectangle, sheesh. I tried it with one print and it seemed to work.



I added a plastic cover, but obviously I need to iron the plastic (under cloth of course) or get a stiffer (but thinner) kind of plastic. Here's a step-by-step demonstration of how to do it. I used scrap newsprint for this, but used stiffer paper for the actual print above.


Fold longer sides about an inch or so (depends on how big your picture is).

 Flip it over and fold top and bottom.

   Fold corners inwards to make triangles.
 
Decorate corners (yes, those swirls are supposed to be decorative - somebody thinks she's chaneling Gustav Klimt, hee).

1 comments:

David DeWall said...

That's a really great way to display your pictures. Van Gogh was one of my favorite artists, too. Good tips.