Filterless: Crafty for Mother's Day

So I decided to get all crafty for Mother's Day again this year with a new photo theme. I scanned through my photos and chose one of Mercer House from a trip to Savannah last August. Using Photoshop, I cropped it so just the center, second story window was showing and made it black and white. Then, using extract, I removed all the window panes.

Don't worry. It'll get cleaned up more later.

For the next step, I started looking through all my photos of myself, my sister and my mom. They all got resized and cropped into the shape of the window panes. My technique for this was probably cheating but it worked. I copied the above picture and pasted it over the one I was using then moved it until the appropriate pane was centered over it. Then I drew a line on the original photos layer to outline it and cropped it using extract. Once that was done, I copied and pasted the edited photo into the working copy of the window above where I situated it over the pane I wanted and cleaned up the edges using the eraser tool. I ended up with 19 layers in the final version of the photo.

I printed out the photo (8 x 10) using a Kodiak kiosk at my local Target. By the way, the Kodiak kiosks don't recognize PNG as a graphic file. I use it as my default and had to go back home and save it as a JPG to print it. I even had a huge rant on the way home about how PNG was a perfectably acceptable format for an image.

Next comes the more complicated part. I wanted a brightly colored (preferably red) frame for the photo, but the store only had 8 x 10 frames in black, white and silver. While standing in the frame section thinking, "crap," I remembered a photocraft book I had read through a few years ago. One of the projects involved a mirror so I toddled one aisle over to look at mirrors. I found a 16 x 16 mirror (including frame) with a lime green frame for $5.

At home, I sliced off the paper cover on the back (they were serious when they glued that sucker down). I then measured and marked the center points on each side. I did the same for the photo. Next, I place the photo (face up) on the back, centered it, and marked off the corners and sides on the mirror back. I then used a razor blade (you can buy single edged blades at any hardware or home improvement store) to scrape off the backing. About halfway through, I started hoping that what I was scraping off wasn't toxic. I think I managed to convince myself that it wasn't. (If it is, don't tell me now.)

Once the backing was off, the silver had to be scraped away. I was wiping the mirror back down with a damp paper towel as I went when I noticed that it scrapped off easier when wet. The brilliant idea occurred to me that maybe an acid would help take it off better so I left a vinegar soaked rag on the part I wasn't working on and then kept switching up the space.

The total time scraping the backing and silver off the mirror was about 3 and a half hours. It took forever. I've now got some interesting calluses on my fingers from the razor blade and my hands smelled like vinegar for about a day.

Finished frame. Ignore the reflection of the popcorn ceiling.