Guest Post – Monika Wright

To round out our fabulous two weeks of Trick or Tweet, we have a wonderful Guest Post – Monika Wright of i love it all! She is super talented and has a fun easy craft for you today!

Hi, I’m Monika Wright and I’ll be walking you down Trick-or-Treat Lane today with a not-so-spooky Halloween craft. I love the candy treats and the cute costumes, but not the tricks and the creepiness so much.

Today, we’ll be making two different framed projects using an art print available as a free download on my blog, i love it all. You’ll see a section titled free downloads in my sidebar.

We’ll begin by making our own photo matte. I recycled the backing from a notepad, but an old cereal box would work just fine, too. When trimming out the middle portion of the matte, you’ll want to cut it somewhat smaller. For example, for a 4×6 photo, you might try cutting your opening 1/8” smaller all around.

I like to use a glue stick to adhere paper to chipboard because it allows me a little wiggle room. I can move it just a bit until it’s in the right position then take my burnisher and make sure the paper and chipboard are thoroughly joined together. You can also use your tape runner, I just find that it’s not very forgiving if you don’t have your front and back aligned perfectly.

For a good, clean, STRAIGHT cut, I use my ruler and place it very, very close to my cut line and then run my Exacto knife between the chipboard and the ruler. The ruler helps me to keep a straight edge, without my Exacto knife getting out of line. And, of course, be sure you are using your cutting mat so that your dining room table doesn’t need to be refinished any time soon. And watch out for your fingers, too.

Once I’ve cut on the back side of the paper, I flip it over and lightly pierce the front of the paper with my Exacto knife to separate the two pieces, if needed.

To put the finishing touches on this matte, I ran some school glue along the edges where the matte and the art meet and used jute twine from the hardware store. If you’re wondering, my pumpkin is from the Dollar Tree.

For another version that’s maybe just a little spookier, but not too creepy, we’re going to use the same technique for making our own matte. You could also use a matte you have on hand that might not be in prime condition anymore and recover it using the same process as I’ve shown here.

I love how the print pops against that black gingham paper. Hmmm, are you wondering about that ghost in the upper right hand corner? This is why he’s there…

…yep, I tore my paper when I was trimming it. Bad things happen to good people, too, right? I tried sanding the edges to see if I could smooth it a bit and that didn’t help, so I went searching through my embellishments. This glow-in-the-dark ghost from several years back is what I came up with and I ended up liking how it turned out. Crisis averted.

The BOO print is sized to 4×6 and looks like this. Happy downloading, I mean Halloween.