United States of America Framed

Ok, this was on of those projects where I got really excited to get finished and didn’t take very many “before” pictures. Sorry, but hopefully I will explain it all well. I ordered this United States of America metal artwork off eBay for my son’s room. I just loved the look of it made from old license plates.  When it arrived, it was much smaller than I thought it would be. It also had two holes at the top the size of a hole punch. It wasn’t quite what I expected. Instead of shipping it back and wasting time, I came up with a plan to make it work.

First, I went to Hobby Lobby and found a nice large frame the size I wanted the piece to be. It was white, of course. However, the white just didn’t seem to fit with the style I was going for. So I took my Minwax jacobean stain and glazed the frame. Once it was all glazed I sanded a few areas to distress it very lightly.

This picture frame came with a cardboard piece between the glass, as most picture frames do. I needed some way to get the metal United States sign to stay. Since it already had two holes I decided I would use the cardboard it came with and gold brad fasteners to attach the sign. I spray painted the cardboard blue. Once that was nice and dry, I attached the metal sign to the cardboard. I just slipped the gold brad fasteners through the two holes the sign had and on through the cardboard. I was worried the sign would be too heavy to hold to the cardboard. This was not the case and it stayed perfectly.

Now that my white frame was all glazed, I still thought it needed a little more. I took some red paint I had on hand to add some racing stripes to the frame. I taped off a larger stripe and smaller stripe right next to each other using frog tape. I had to put on two coats of red paint for the stripes.

Once my red racing stripes were dry, I put my sign and cardboard piece all back together in the frame. It was exactly what I wanted for my son’s room! It turned out to be the perfect size and colors I had hoped for. Even though I didn’t originally like the sign, my improvements made me fall in love with it.