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KID’S ART FRAME DIY

Art frame to easily display and switch out kids art
Prep Time 1 hour 30 minutes
Glue Dry Time 1 day
Total Time 1 day 1 hour 30 minutes
Servings 1 frame
Cost $15

Equipment

  • small saw or compact hand saw
  • hot glue gun
  • X-Acto knife, ruler, and cutting mat

Ingredients

Instructions

  • First you’ll want to remove the back from your frame. Place it back-side-up on a piece of wax paper and cut your square dowels to fit to make a frame all the way around your backing (this small handsaw cut mine really easily and really quickly!).
  • Use some wood glue to attach the dowels to each other and line the inside edge of the dowel with glue where the frame backing will sit against it so you are also glueing the backing to the inside of the frame at the same time. Having wax paper under it will protect your table from any wood glue seepage and the glue won’t stick to the wax paper when dry so you can peel it up easily.
  • Once your glue has totally set, flip the frame over and use your small hinges to attach the framed backing to the front frame piece. You can screw the hinges in if you want, but the ones I bought didn’t have recessed holes for the screws so the screwheads stuck out more than I would like and it wouldn’t close completely flat, but if you have hinges with recessed holes that won’t be an issue.
  • Hinges can be annoying to figure out exactly where they should go, so glueing them with super glue is actually a lot easier than screwing them in! I just opened the hinge flat and glued two hinge plates at the edge of my backing frame (with the actual moving hinge part hanging over the edge) and then once that was dry enough, I folded the other side of the hinge down with a folded piece of wax paper in the middle to keep the hinge from being glued shut, put some more super glue on top of the hinge plate and then centered and placed the top frame on top and allowed it to fully dry.
    You really want to let the glue fully dry before trying to open it and take out the wax paper fold (give it a day) otherwise the hinges may pop off. Trust me!
  • Once the hinges are on, cut out two pieces of foam core slightly smaller than the size of art your frame holds and glue them onto the backing stacked on top of each other. If you don’t have this foamcore backing, your art piece will kind of float around in the space but the backing helps to push it up to the front of the frame so it looks much better.
    If you want your frame to look more like one unit, you can also paint the wooden dowels you added the color of your frame so the blend together more.
  • Glue your magnets to the frame and backing in the two corners opposite your hinges so that the frame will stay closed when hanging, and screw in your canvas hangers on the back with a screwdriver and your artwork display is ready to hang!