Why buy art when you can create it?

I often find myself swooning over all things Pottery Barn.  I know, you are shocked.  I love our their style!  I was perusing through and found this:

I thought to myself: "Self, you can make that!"  I tweaked it a little, because it's my house and I can :)  I didn't want another mainly black piece of art, so I made mine white with black numbers. 

All of my frames in my house are black (most have been spray painted that way.)  I use to love picture frames when I was a teen and collected quite a few over the years.  However, I felt like they were taking away from the important pictures I had in them, so I unified them in color. Black-it's slimming ;)

I am ALWAYS on the look out for interesting frames and frames with matting. 

Did you know you can paint the matte too?!?  I paint all mine white.  I am also a fan of matting, but it is EX-PEN-SIVE...  So I use poster board instead sometimes (shhhhh, it's a secret.)  I use to use construction paper, but that fades to easily in the sun.

I came across some inexpensive frames for the GW. I scored them for half price (yellow tags were marked down) and also an additional 10% off because I got the GW discount card!

They were $3.99 originally....then $1.99 and then finally, $1.79!  I also got some UGLY pictures for $5 from craigslist.  They were marked $199 on the back...whateva!  I painted over them, the smaller rectangles got a coat of chalkboard paint and are in the girls' rooms and the bigger one is now my PB number artwork!

I also came across a black canvas with some white string I can't seem to find the picture and be able to attach it.  It was in the PB catalog and thought it would be simple to create...it was!!

I started out with this stuff:

Morgan said, oh so nicely, "Mom, I don't think those are very pretty."  I said, "I know and I'm glad you don't have tacky taste!  I am going to paint them."

They turned out like this:

I just popped some cute pics the girls drew when they were little.  They had been in my wallet for years, now everyone can enjoy them!  I also plan on getting some frames for them to have art to change out as they want. 


Here they are on the wall:

-Make your life beautiful!

Kari