polaroid – emerald city diaries

a while ago i posted about the polaroid project where i made “polaroids” out of pictures of parisian french doors. i really liked the way the pictures turned out, but i didn’t love that they were just stuck on the wall. the pictures came down along with everything else over thanksgiving weekend when we painted the bedroom & i finally got around to finding a new way to display the pictures {i framed them!}.

this was super easy. i picked up two fjallsta frames from ikea. i knew i wanted big picture frames & decided the square frame was what i wanted. i also picked up some poster tack & two heavy white posterboards from target.

i opened up the frame & took out the mat. i traced the outside of the mat onto the posterboard, one for each frame, & then cut. {this is what the second picture is, i know its hard to see with the white on white.}

then i measured the inside {back} of the frame to figure out how much of a margin i would need to leave between the edge of the posterboard & the edge of the pictures. i left a one inch margin on the left, right & bottom edges, and a one-and-a-quarter inch margin on the top {the extra 1/4 inch was to account for the washi tape}.

then i added a small wad of poster tack to the top corners of each picture. the washi tape was already on the tops of all the pictures.

i placed the four corner pictures first & then filled in the rest of the grid.

& then the frames went back onto our bedroom walls as a fun reminder of our trip to paris!

what kind of art are you framing & hanging on your walls?

while we were in paris in the spring of 2011, we started taking pictures of the beautiful french doors that were all over the city. i didn’t know what we would do with them at the time (& didn’t for over a year after the trip), but i wanted to do some kind of art piece for the house.

i thought at first i might just print a few, frame them, & hang them in a grouping, but then i thought that it would be cool to print them to look like polaroids. my original idea was to print the photos, cut them into squares, & mount them onto white cardstock – a faux polaroid.

i didn’t work or even think about this project for months, but then this summer i stumbled onto the perfect thing: the polaroid image maker. this program is a free download & pretty fun to use. you open up the “camera,” drag a picture file into the camera, & the picture “develops” on your screen. you can only do ten pictures at a time (since real polaroid film only has ten exposures) so if you want to do more pictures, you have to close & re-open the program. also, the program can also put a filter on the image, but this is optional if you don’t want it.

{my polaroids developing on my desktop}

{a sampling of my polaroids}

once i had all of my polaroids (i made almost 50 since i couldn’t choose which doors wouldn’t make the cut) i had them printed at mpix. the reason i chose mpix over the usual snapfish or target printing is because mpix has a 4 by 5 print option, which is perfect for printing a polaroid (or is it a faux-laroid?).

i got my prints fairly quickly & was really happy with the results. obviously they didn’t look exactly like polaroids, but they were pretty darn close! i wanted to keep this project simple, so i decided just to tape the polaroids to the wall instead of trying to do any framing or anything. i found some cute “airmail stripe” washi tape* on etsy that i thought would fit in with the parisian theme without being too corny. {update: a few of the pictures have been falling off the wall, so i think adding a bit of poster tacky stuff – you know what i am talking about? – to the backs of the pictures to keep them from falling since washi tape isn’t very strong.}

{i put them up on opposing walls of our bedroom near our closet doors & changed up the pattern. apparently i should have printed one more picture…fail.}

i don’t know if we will keep this photo arrangement after we paint our room (fingers crossed this happens over thanksgiving weekend!) but for now it is a fun reminder of our trip to paris & an easy way to cover some once-bare walls.

are you nostalgic for polaroids? have you tried making your own faux-laroids?

*when did wasabi tape start being called washi tape?

Category: polaroid

diy framed polaroids.

the polaroid project.