Burlap Matted Frame

As we all know, Valentine's Day is coming up this Thursday. My boyfriend and I aren't really into Valentine's Day; we usually just like to go to a movie or cook dinner together. This year, though, he has class until 9 PM on V-Day, so obviously, we won't be doing much that night (I like to sleep..a lot). While we're going away this weekend to his family's beach house in Rhode Island, I still wanted to make the actual 14th a little bit special.

Ethan (the boyfriend) has always wanted a flask, so, being the awesome girlfriend that I am, I got him a monogrammed flask that he can use for his whiskey or scotch or whatever it is people put in flasks. While I know he'll like the gift, I also wanted to get him something a little more meaningful. So, I'm giving him a gift "from" our dog, Olive. Stupid, I know, but I have turned into the crazy dog lady and I don't even care how insane this makes me look.

While I'll be outlining the Valentine's Day gift from the dog later this week, tonight I had to do some prep work to get the frame ready for whats going inside. Last week, on a trip to Ikea, I picked up this Ribba frame with room for a 4.75" square picture. While I could have gone larger, I didn't want to lose the mat, as I think it makes frames (and the pictures inside) look a little fancier. But, at the same time, the white mat bored me. So, I decided to jazz it up a bit with some burlap.

I love the way burlap looks - a little bit rustic, but still very clean. I think it adds some great dimension to something boring like a picture frame and I hoped it would really draw some interest to the piece.

All in all, this project took me about 15 minutes and $10 (for the frame). Everything else, I had on hand, and if you have some frames lying around, this could be absolutely free.

These were all the materials I needed: some burlap ribbon I had on hand from something I did over Christmas, a hot glue gun (and about 2 hot glue sticks), scissors, and of course, the mat. To start, I simply cut a piece of the ribbon that I knew would be at least as long as one side of the mat.

I applied some hot glue to the edges of the ribbon and simply pressed it down. I cut off and excess to make it as close to perfect as possible. Whenever I could, I simply wrapped the ribbon around the back of the mat to make it the best fit I could.

I continued this process...gluing and cutting as much as I needed to along the way.

After all the ribbon was laid down and glued on tight, I had to cut a bit more off until I had something that looked like this:

And of course, a nice view of the back, which was a little messier, but who cares! No one is going to see it anyways.

Then, all I did was stick it back in the frame and onto the photo ledge. While the frame is still empty for right now, I think it looks a million times better than the original.