Painted Picture Frames and Plaques

This post is kind of an after thought. It's a project I did a few months back. Our master bedroom has this huge ledge along one wall. All we had sitting on it was a Home Sweet Home mantle/shelf decoration someone gave us when we got married. It's nice but didn't really dress up the ledge.  After night after night of staring  at this empty ledge I decided something needed to be done, but I didn't know what.  I have this very fuzy vision of wire baskets and greenery and all sorts of cute things that I cut fully visualize and with out a clear full picture it's hard to do.  Well, I went to Michael, probably to get some yarn, and decided to walk around , to see if I could find anything for the ledge when I stumbled upon the wood craft isle.  I found some very inexpensive stuff and made a couple of cute things to stick up on the ledge.

I made a couple of picture frames and decorative plaques.

For supplies I bought some unfinished wood frames and plaques, for 1-2 dollars a piece. (Michaels had some nice expensive unflinished plaques too, so dont be fooled that have some cheap ones hiding some where to.) I also go some unfinished wood flowers, the words love and family, several bottles of acrylic paint (about 60 cents a piece) in colors that match the beautiful quilt my Grandma made us when we got married, some wood glue, some cheap paint brushes, and a couple of wire easels for the plaques.  The nice thing is that Michaels has a lot of little would shapes, like animals, bugs, fish, beachy stuff, cars, letters, etc. so you don't have to do flowers. Get creative! (The picture is lacking some of these supplies since this post is an after thought and all I could put in the picture is the left overs.)

I painted everything in layers. I started  by painting the plaques white, the  frames gray, and the flowers either, blue purple or green, and the pots on my flowers brown (The words I bought were already painted, I did repaint the love green because I didn't want it pink, the family was already blue, how perfect.) I let them dry then I painted on the details, like yellow in the middle of the flowers and the white dots on the frames and tulip pots. After everything was dry I used the wood glue to glue the words, the flowers to the frames. I let them sit for a while while the wood glue dried. I didn't get any spray to set the paint or anything. This was a cheap project and I don't expect them to last for ever, but if you were looking to make something more permanent you might want to spray on a layer of clear finish.

Now these aren't the most exciting decorations if you ask me and no where near the fuzzy vision of wire baskets and greenery, but it is much better than looking at a blank ledge and they also match the quilt we have on our bed.  So, now I'm open to ideas on how to add some greenery or something to this ledge to fill in a little bit more of the space behind and/or around the frames and plaques.