I bet you’re wondering how I got to the picture above right? Well, I’ll tell you. I made some DIY art awhile back in this blog post. The more I looked at them, I felt like they needed to be framed. Now, I don’t know about you but framing prices are sky high. I don’t want to knock framers, because in their own way they are artists but it’s hard to part with more money than the actual art costs. If I had unlimited amounts of money, I would definitely get my art framed but I don’t have it like that. Therefore, I went to YouTube University to figure out how to frame my canvas art with wood molding.
Here is what they looked like without framing. Okay, but not great. I was sure the framing would make the art look more substantial.
Here are the supplies I used:
Stanley Powerlock Tape Measure
I started off by pulling out my leftover 1×2 boards. I had a few pieces of furring strip boards that were dirt cheap (roughly $1.58/board) but very rough and I had two six foot pieces of a beautiful poplar board that I was going to use for a large piece of art I wanted to frame a long time ago and hadn’t gotten around to it. The price is a hefty $12.99 per board, but for certain projects, it’s worth it. I was going to use the furring strip boards for all three of these but I didn’t have enough. So I used the cheaper boards for the small black canvases and one piece of the poplar board for the book page canvas.
I measured everything and laid out my leftover pieces to see which ones I could use.
Then I commenced to using my miter saw, which I love, but one day I want to get the big gun – the Ryobi Sliding Compound Miter Saw. Ah, a girl can dream.
This does the job even though you have to use a little elbow grease.
I laid it out with the art to make sure nothing was too wonky and more or less fit. I’m going to be thinking about this step later. You’ll see what I mean.
Here’s the artwork that I decided to use the good poplar board on. You can’t tell from the pictures how much better this wood is, but it is.
I glued the pieces together, then tried to use a trick that I’ve seen on Youtube where you use leftover sawdust to fill in the seams. I don’t think I did it correctly, because it just gummed up so I didn’t use it on the second one.
I also didn’t like using my little corner clamps. They’re so hard to pull back to fit the wood into and I felt like they didn’t hold the pieces all the way together. So the next one I used my 24” bar clamps which worked much better.
After leaving everything overnight to dry, I sanded all of the boards along with the seams with 80 grit sandpaper to make everything smooth. The furring strips needed much more sanding than the poplar board. Then I set up my staining station. I just laid down a large black trash bag over my dining room table and propped up the frames with leftover pieces of wood.
I had some Golden Oak minwax stain leftover from a previous project so I painted all of the sides with a 1” chip brush and wiped it off with a microfiber cloth. I love these chip brushes because they’re one and done. No having to clean brushes which is usually a necessary evil. I thought I would have to do two coats but I think the color was really good with just one coat. Just as I suspected, the poplar took the stain much better than the furring strips.
It took about 3 hours for the stain to dry thoroughly. Now, all I had to do was pop the artwork into the frames which was easier said than done. I had to do some finagling and I don’t think my clamps actually kept the 90 degree angle, but I finally got them in. So that’s how I arrived at the picture in the beginning.
The thing I would do differently is maybe glue the frame with the artwork in them? I would have to stain them beforehand though. Hmmmm. I’ll have to do some more thinking and some more Youtubing.
Let me know if you’ve ever framed a canvas yourself and how you did it. It would be much appreciated.
Until next time.
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