DIY First Dance Frame

We've been married for over three years now, and despite the fact that we had an amazing photographer (check out Teresa Choi Photography) and that we ordered a big stack of photos, right now they're just sitting in a pile and we haven't put any on display. We have such a small amount of wall space in our condo, and since we were living here for a few years before we got married, it was all pretty much taken up already and we never found a spot to put any of our wedding photos. In the new place, we'll finally be putting some of those photos up - starting with this frame of our first dance.

On Pinterest, I came across a pin with a product made by Lovely Written Words on Etsy - the lyrics from your first dance written on a mat to frame a photo of your dance. How cute! The real-deal version is lovely, handwritten, and very reasonably priced (and requires no work!), so I would definitely recommend it! But since I'm trying not to spend any extra money, I wanted to make something similar myself.

Materials:

• 8x10 picture frame
• Scrapbook paper
• 5x7 print
• Card stock
• Poster board

Total cost: $6.50 ($3.50 for a sale frame at Joann, $1 for scrapbook paper, $2 for the print, I had leftover card stock and poster board on hand)

First, I decided on a picture. Rather than one, I decided to use a series of three - I like how this captures the movement & mood of our dance. Of course, using a single picture would work just as well!

My handwriting is not something that should be framed on anyone's wall, so a handwritten one was definitely out for me. I Googled 'free fonts' and found this one at 1001 free fonts:

This was actually the very first font listed on the website when I looked as one of 'today's free fonts' (so I'm guessing this particular font isn't always available for free? I'm not sure exactly how that website works...) I was pretty lazy about selecting a font since the first one I saw was right in line with what I had pictured using.

Next step was to grab the lyrics. Our song was More by Bobby Darin. Before we got married, we didn't already have something that we considered 'our song', and we decided it would be fun to dance to a swing song for the first dance. We thought 'More' was perfect - classic, sweet, and upbeat.

I pasted the lyrics into Word and put them in my new fancy, schmancy font, using font size 30. I moved the margins so they were 8x10, then put a 5x7 white rectangle in the center where the photo would go and had the text wrap around it. This is what my template looked like in Word:















Then I printed the lyrics template on my scrapbook paper. I was being indecisive in the store (this is a common problem for me!), so I ended up buying three different kinds of paper to try out. They each had a different look & feel and printed out very differently.









I decided on the tissue-paper-thin one since the lyrics were easy to read (unlike the metallic one) and I thought it was a bit more unique looking than the iridescent textured one. To bring out the white-on-white pattern of the paper, I also decided to put a piece of black card stock behind it.








Since the border of my photo was white like the paper, I cut out a piece of black card stock to frame the photo. Then to give the frame more depth, I cut out a piece of poster board to raise the photo. Using scrapbooking photo squares, I attached the photo to the 5x7 black card stock, the black card stock to the poster board, the poster board to the paper with the lyrics, and the lyrics paper to the 8x10 black card stock backer.





Then I put the whole stack into the frame. Here's the finished product (although I think it looks better in person - I was struggling to get good photos!):