Father's Day Frame 2011

It's time to make Father's Day Frames! This is our third year making them and it's really fun to see how Peyton and Ella's decorative choices are evolving as they get older. You can see our frames from 2009 and 2010 here.

I love this project. It's fairly simple and definitely homemade looking. No fancy-schmancy nonsense here. This is Pure Kid Art.

Here's what you'll need:

Card Stock

Pictures

Crayons or Markers

Scissors

Tape

Mounting Squares (optional - you can just as easily use tape)

6 Paperclips

Letter Templates or you can make your own letters

For the previous frames, I had strongly urged Peyton and Ella to use crayons. Because if you use markers, sooner or later the paper will start to curl at the edges if you don't properly back it with stronger paper.  My years as an elementary school teacher have taught me important things such as these. Imagine 35+ art pages curling away on a bulletin board and driving me bananas. But Peyton and Ella REALLY wanted to use markers, and I let them be the bosses of this project, so there you go. Marker kicks Crayon's butt every time.

I'm going to show Ella's creative process for this one, but they each actually made their own this year. That's a big step in our little world!

So we printed up the letters on white card stock. Ella colored happily away with her markers and then she cut out the Y. She wanted me to cut out the rest.

She picked out 10 of her favorite Ella and/or Daddy pictures. We printed them up in 2x3 inch size. You don't need 10 pictures, but it's good to have an assortment when you're trying to puzzle them into the frames of the letters. 

We fit her pictures into the letter frames and taped them into place. She also wanted her letters framed with rainbow colors. So she chose her own colors and then decided which color should frame each letter. I cut them out and stuck them in place with mounting squares. 

Peyton wanted to keep his plain, so I just backed his with leftover white card stock to protect the letters from curling.

I overlapped the letters a little and attached them with mounting squares. I used the bottom edge of a piece of paper as a guide to make sure I was attaching them in a straight line. 

Here's the back:

I opened up the paperclips and Ella taped them into place.

So here is Ella's Father's Day frame:

I love all the colors in her frame! And I like that she had me cut the hole in the A a little larger so that it could fit two pictures. Clever girl!

Peyton and Ella both wanted hearts and little note on the back of their frames, just like last year. So we did a little more cutting and coloring and mounting squaring: 

And here is Peyton's Father's Day frame:

I love his super awesome marker skills and all the color he used.

And the back of his frame:

I'm so proud of my kids! I love their frames and I know James will, too!

Happy Father's Day!