Raising a Kumquat: Temple Picture Project

A few weeks ago we made these awesome temple pictures in Relief Society:

During the project my friend commented how awesome it would be to have a whole wall of temple pictures. Of course, I went straight home and started planning how I was going to do it. On a tight budget of exactly $0 for craft and home decorating, I knew I was going to have to get creative! I couldn't afford the $30-$120 per picture it cost at the activity, so I starved my family for a week and used grocery money to make my own temple pictures for less!

Newport Beach

Los Angeles (nice iPhone blurring technique)

Kirtland (Kami's favorite)

Nauvoo (we went there a couple years ago for a family reunion)

St. George

Now I just have to finish the others (Oakland, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Logan) so I can hang these on my new temple wall!

The pictures were taken by Altus Photo Design and can be found here : http://www.flickr.com/photos/31543164@N08/tags/ldstemple/

I double checked to make sure it was legal to download the photos and use them for myself before I had them printed at Costco. The prints cost $.39 to $2.99 each depending on the size. The smallest print is the Los Angeles (4x6), and the largest is the Las Vegas (6x18 which I haven't completed yet.)

After Costco, it was off to Home Depot, where I had to give the wood-cutting employee a free lunch at our sub shop (shameless plug here: FIREHOUSE SUBS on Flamingo and Ft. Apache in Las Vegas.) so he wouldn't charge me $.50 per cut for the 19 cuts I needed on the 4x8 piece of wood I planned to use to back the pictures.

While at Home Depot, I utilized my big-girl panties and sawed close to a million pieces of various widths of baseboard moulding to use for my frames. The thinnest is 3 1/2" and the widest is 6"--I bought the pre-primed mdf because it seemed like less work than the non-primed stuff.

With my backing and moulding in tow, I headed to the paint counter where I spent something like two hours deciding which black was the "right" one--who knew there were so many shades of black?!? And seriously, those little samples of wood that demonstrate the "sheen" are useless. I spent another hour before I finally settled on semi-gloss.

The following morning, I woke my teenage son up around 1:00 in the afternoon with the sound of power tools. Jordan was geniunely concerned enough to call my husband at work to ask if it was okay that mom was using a power miter saw in the back yard. I guess he was afraid it wasn't safe enough to just come ask me...

With all my pieces cut and only one or two minor mistakes, I was ready to use another PINTEREST tip!

What a clever idea! A rubber-band around the paint can kept the whole can nice and clean which totally satisfied my "keep-my-projects-neat-and-tidy" ocd. Okay, that's not technically a form of ocd, but I have it anyway.

Here are my cut frames neatly resting on plastic cups on newspaper on my dining room table:

I didn't take pictures of staple-gunning the frames together, but I will next time, because it's not as easy as it seems. You definitely need a frame thingamagig that holds the frame perfectly square while you staple. The correct term may be "band clamp" but I'm not sure.

I can't wait to use this idea I found on PINTEREST to hang my pictures!