Budget Kitchen Wall Art

I have fallen hard for all the typography art that is around these days.  I would cover my walls in words, sayings and subway prints if I had a chance.  One of my first purchases in this vein was a set of ceramic words, ‘cook’ and ‘eat’, for the kitchen in bright red.  They were an absolute bargain – like $8 at Kmart.

So after positioning them on the small wall I have above my kitchen work top, you can see I was left with an empty space.  Unusually for me, I have left this go unfilled for quite a while.  This week, getting sick of not finding something I love to go there, I decided to create my own piece of art.

I purchased a suitably sized deep frame from Kmart for $6 in white.  I wanted a shadow box style  frame but I couldn’t seem to easily find one but thought that this, with a little tinkering, would easily convert into one. I raided my son’s cutlery draw and found a small fork and knife that sat nicely inside the mat board of the frame.  I then went and purchased a can of gloss all-surface spray paint in red to paint these (sorry it didn’t even occur to me to photography these pre-project).

Getting busy with the spray can yesterday, I painted the frame and the cutlery.  This morning I mucked around with the frame to make it into a shadow box, glued the cutlery to the board and framed it all up.

Getting the frame to hang in the right position was a cinch with these 3M picture hanging strips.

They are like velcro.  One side sticks to the frame and the other to the wall.  They now make them in skinny strips so they attach beautifully to a narrow frame’s edges like the ones on my frame.

So this is what the wall ended up looking like:

I think it doesn’t look too bad.  Certainly worth the $6 it cost me without the paint which I have heaps left of for another project.