another DIY.

i don't know about you, but i have so many pictures lying around the house just waiting to be framed. unfortunately, matting is so. freaking. expensive. so i came up with this clever idea of making your own matting, very inexpensively! 

i bought jon a couple andy warhol's from a street vender (they're so obviously original.. ;) ) and wasn't sure what to do with them. we bought this huge frame from ikea for the print i bought before we got married and hung it above our bed. i hated the way i looked, so we took it down and it was just sitting in our laundry room. i thought i could hang both prints in the huge frame for jon's downstairs bathroom. 

 i went to blick and bought a nice sheet of 20x30 poster board. they had different colors, but jon requested black. 

 the first thing i did was cut it down to fit in the frame.

 here i am, modeling how it fit the frame just marvelously. 

 then i measured where both of the prints would go. i drew a line halfway down the poster board, and halfway down both pictures. then i just decided where i wanted the bottom picture to go. when matting stuff like this, you should have more space between the bottom of the picture and bottom of the frame than the top of the top picture and top of the frame. that made it easy because i didn't need to have the exact same measurements above and below the pictures. i figured out exactly where the pictures would be, and i started to cut!

 i had to cut each line a few times to make sure it went all the way through the board, and was very careful with the corners so i wouldn't cut too far and have an exposed rip. 

 here it is! so it turned out to just be a frame for both pictures to sit behind. 

 unfortunately, one of the pictures was smaller than the other. i thought i accounted for that, but not enough. you can barely see the white edge though, so it's alright.

 i taped the pictures to the back of the poster board on all four sides, to ensure that they won't slip. 

 while i was putting the frame together-THE GLASS BROKE!!!! i was so furious. all that work, and in one of the last steps, the glass breaks. 

i hung it up anyway, and you can't even see the break in the glass! it's like an optical illusion. the frame looks really big in the bathroom, but i think the size is pretty cool. i've second guessed it, but for now it's nice. i hate everything else about the bathroom. the towel racks. why? why are there towel racks in a half bath? just put a small one near the sink, that's all you need. also, the fact that the toilet is hugging the vanity instead of being centered on that wall. the metal toothbrush and cup holder. i could go on and on. 

but, this is an improvement since we've been here for almost two years and i've just done nothing with this bathroom. now i want to find an interesting boy rug to put in here that isn't plain black and boring. i'm glad that i now know how easy it is to put matting around things you want to frame for cheap!