The first of these homemade gifts, is a wood-grain paper frame with stand.
I’ve admired wood grain on paper products, fabric, and even carved into yummy desserts. I never tire of it. I LOVE wood grain and thought that painting it onto a paper frame would make my hand-made gift that much cuter.
I grabbed my trusty pad of watercolor paper, two containers of acrylic paint (a metallic brown and lemony yellow), and a saucer of water. With wet strokes, I painted on an uneven layer of brown, and ran some yellow streaks through it. The nice thing about painting wood grain, is that you don’t need to be terribly careful with your strokes.
After painting the brown and yellow base, I washed my brush and flipped it around so that the bristles were pointed towards the sky. With the wrong-end of the paint brush I drew uneven, but parallel lines into the wet paint. I added a few “knots” in the wood by drawing in ovals and tracing them loosely, and presto: we’ve got wood! Let the paper dry for a spell and repeat this technique on the backside of your paper.
After the paper has dried completely, grab the photo you would like to frame and the following:
A pair of scissors
X-Acto knife
Tacky glue
Markers
Cutting board
Clothes pins (or a chip clip.)
Fold the painted paper in half and slip the photograph inside the fold to get an idea of how large you would like your frame. I was framing a 5×7 photograph and wanted my frame to be about the same size- if not slightly larger.
I measured out a rectangle on one side of the folded paper (where the photograph would peek through) and drew convex rounds in the corners to give it a little extra design element. I removed the photograph from the inside of the fold, unfolded the paper and placed it on the cutting board. With my X-Acto knife, I carefully cut out the rectangle. I folded the paper again and slipped the photo back inside the card to make sure I was happy with the size.
With a toothpick, I applied Tacky glue around the edges of the frame and pressed the edges together- securing them with clothes pins.
Love the idea, love the faux wood, love bryce canyon! You are rad, radmegan!
-laura B.
Thanks Laura!! xoxo
I love the woodgrain look and think that paper stand is awesome! This project will be tucked away for future use~
Thank you Sharon
and you did it again! i’m seriously slacking, i have something similar in the works. wood grain, but not painted. i’m still doing it though, so there! back to the ironing board. no…really, i’m ironing right now. LOVE THIS!
Haha @ “so there!” Jek, you better post it! I look forward to reading about your awesomeness. Have fun … ironing… O_o
This is sooo cute and simple
Thanks for the post, Imma try making that stand sometime 
It’s pretty cool 😀
Love,
TCM
This is great!! Thanks for the post, it also seems really simple to make!!
Thanks so much TCM!! xoxox
I want to refinish an entire piece of furniture like this. Too cute.
Ooooh great idea a.b.! Send me a link to your finished piece when you do!
xo
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Thank you. I cannot describe how grateful I am towards your post. A major school project of mine is due in a week and I haven’t really got any ideas of how to display it yet. And once I did, something went horribly wrong. But now I do and nothing will go wrong again thanks to this post.