# 7 – I Heart Crafty Things {The 13 Crafts of Christmas}

Hi. This is Rachel from I Heart Crafty Things and I am so excited and feel so honored to be here on Lines Across My Face celebrating 13 Crafts of Christmas. I am a Mom to three beautiful kids and I LOVE doing arts and crafts with them. I always try to couple our crafts with children’s stories or activities we do as a family and that’s what you will find over at my blog.  🙂  Some of my favorites we’ve done this year have been our Out of This World craft and our House for Hermit Crab craft.

Now on to the fun Christmas stuff. Before Halloween, after seeing lots of googly eye picture frames pinned on Pinterest, we decided to make our own. I found a shadow box style frame at Dollar Tree and really loved the look of it so we used it and came up with this to display for Halloween.

We enjoyed making our picture frame so much that we thought it would be fun to make a couple to be festive for the Christmas season. After gathering a few supplies from Michael’s and purchasing a couple more frames from Dollar Tree we set off to making our creations.

Ok, for the life of me, I could not get a good picture without a glare. Here they are up close.

These are super simple to make (my kids helped me) and would make awesome gifts for grandparents or loved ones!

Here are the materials you need:
-Picture frame from dollar store (I used the shadow box frame and love that the embellishments are inside the frame to help preserve them longer, but any frame will do that you can add the embellishments to)
-Paint
-Glitter (optional, but who doesn’t love glitter?)
-Christmas foam stickers
-Letter stickers
-Small piece of card stock paper
-Ribbon
-Glue Gun

1. First, remove the  picture matting out of the frame and paint it.

I chose to use this tempera metallic blue and green paint. It came in a pack with 6 metallic colors. I purchased it at Michael’s with my 40% off coupon and since I know I will have a billion crafts projects to use it on in the future it was a great purchase.

2. Since Tempera paint is really water based and thin, the kids had to paint three good coats on it.  After applying the third coat of paint we sprinkled gold glitter all over the frames to give it some more bling.  haha

3. While the paint was drying we decided what words we wanted to display on our frames, placed the letter stickers on a corresponding piece of card stock paper and cut them out.

4. After the paint was completely dry, we opened up our foam stickers and stuck them all over the picture matting. We first laid them out how we wanted them on the frame and then I helped the kids remove the sticker backing and they put them on the frame. Don’t worry about some stickers getting inside the picture space because it looks cool that way. I used my scissors to trim off any stickers that hung over the outside of the frame.

The selection of foam stickers at Michael’s was huge so there are so many possibilities. There were candy canes, snowmen, Santa Claus faces, Christmas trees, reindeer, etc.

5. Next choose a picture you want to display in the frame. You could even print off a favorite quote to go inside it.

6. Tape the picture to the back of the picture matting to hold it in place.

7. I ended up gluing my matting directly to the cardboard picture backing to make sure there wasn’t any crinkling when I put it in the frame. If yours lays flat against the cardboard, I would skip this step so you could swap out the picture in the future. Then just put the frame together.

8. Use your glue gun to attach the ribbon to the back of the frame and your words on top of the ribbon. I found this cute garland looking ribbon at Michael’s and fell in love with it.

9. Now just stand back and admire your darling new Christmas picture frames. My husband even commented on how cute they are without me even coaxing him (and that my friends is rare! LOL).

I hope you enjoyed my Christmas picture frames and get inspired to make some of your own. Make sure you stop by I Heart Crafty Things to check out all of our fun children’s crafts!

Merry Christmas and Happy Crafting!!