Distressed Wood Picture Frame Pin Board

Pretty much everyone I know is using Pinterest these days. Granted, it is a pretty awesome idea- give people a place to keep all the random ideas, recipes and what-all they find for later. The amount of content we all come across online is absolutely stunning, so it totally works. However, I am one of those weirdos who still gets the newspaper, and I like to clip out recipes, books I see reviewed, events I want to go to, and since I have nowhere to keep them I stick them to the fridge with magnets. And then hubbie yells at me because they  fall down and you can't actually see the fridge is white. So. This little project was an attempt to impose some order on my little bits and pieces of paper.

It all started with a huge Amazon box (thanks, honey for having 18 boxes delivered for your new computer!) and a really ugly old picture frame.

We found this cool old sailing picture at a re-sale shop a while back, but the frame did absolutely nothing for it. I felt bad just throwing away the frame, and I had always wanted to try distressing wood, and this seemed like a good opportunity. That way, if it totally sucked, I wouldn't be ruining something that was nice or cost any money! You're probably noting that the frame already looks a bit distressed, but I was shooting for pretty distressed, not old and ugly distressed.

I Googled around and found what looked like a pretty simple technique for distressing wood using Vaseline. Check it out here. So to start, I painted the frame a nice gold color.

Then I rubbed on the Vaseline on the edges like the tutorial said- you can sort of see the shiny places in the picture. Once it was dry, I painted a pretty blue over it. You can see how the paint didn't stick well in the Vaseline-y places, which was exactly the point:

To finish this part off, I used our dry sink scrubbie (you were supposed to use steel wool, but I just didn't have that around) to get some of the blue paint to come off and let the pretty gold show through. I was actually super pleased with the result. I think it looks a lot like the chair found here.

After the frame was complete, I just needed to create the board for the pinning part. I could have bought cork board, but again, was kinda feeling the "use what's around the house" vibe. So I took that big old Amazon box, traced the inside of my frame and cut it up with a box cutter. Three layers seemed about enough so that the pin didn't stick out the other side.

I had some fabric leftover from when I was hemming our Ikea curtains, so I wrapped that around the layers of cardboard and used a regular stapler to stick them all together.

Put the fabric board inside the frame, and then traced another piece of cardboard from the outside of the frame, and then had hubbie use an industrial stapler to staple the cardboard into the wood and add a new picture frame hanger.

My new real life pinterest board is now hanging on the inside of the door of my crafting closer, and the fridge is much cleaner now!

P.S. This post has been added for Sew Chatty's "Link Up" party!