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I am a photography fanatic. I love taking pictures, tweaking pictures, and finding the beauty in every day items

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Chinese Picture Frame


I am a photo fanatic. I love frames, I love a good photo, and guess what? I love a GOOD photo in a GOOD frame :) Who would have thought?! This is why I busted out my wood burner and made myself my own frame. All you need is...

One wooden frame (Joann's sells them for $1)
Wood Burner (can get them from $9 at Walmart to $16 at Joann's)
Chinese Symbols

1. Go online and search Chinese symbols under "images" and pick some out that you like. Copy and paste them into Microsoft Word and make them a size that you think will be good. Once you have a size you like, arrange them, a nice pattern, to say something, whatever way pleases you.

2. Now you can print off your page and start to transfer. The best way to transfer them (nice and neatly) is to take a pencil and trace over the symbols good and dark. When all of the symbols are colored-in with the pencil, flip the page over and lay it down on the frame.

3. Take something like a credit card and start rubbing all over the back on the page, make sure the paper doesn't move. But rub over and over again; the better and longer you rub the pencil/symbols into the wood the better it will show.

4. Now that all the symbols are on the frame, get your wood burner and start to burn/trace all the symbols. If you want to give it a nice finished look then go ahead and stain the frame. I did mine a nice oak brown, but I think next time I am going to do a rich deep red wood.

Hint: Buy two frames, since they are only a buck, and use one of them as a tester. Woodburners are easy to use, but it takes a little to get use to holding them and applying the right amount of pressure.

Here are a few links to some images of Chinese characters that look good. I used this one, it was great cause it was already lined up, so I put it into Word and just copied it how it was and repeated the line. But be warned, they have the characters for a few swear words, but this was the best images that I could find, so I used it anyways. Here are a couple more (symbols 1) (symbols 2)

14 comments:

  1. You are so crafty! What a good idea and it turned out well!

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  2. That is very cool. Those would make great Christmas gifts! We even already have a woodburner!

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  3. That is so cool--so simple yet so pretty :)

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  4. It turned out great! What a great gift idea.

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  5. Then I first saw the title of this post I thought you would be complaining that all the picture frames at wal-mart are made in china...but this is a novel idea: a Chinese picture frame made in the States. Maybe you should export these to help with the trade imbalance :-)

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  6. what a great idea, although it works better if you aren't blind.
    I think I will tell one of my friends

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  7. you do realise that all these symbols are now back to front because you didnt reverse them b4 you printed them off so they are all either mean nothing or have a completely different meaning

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  8. It was certainly interesting for me to read this blog. Thanks for it. I like such themes and anything that is connected to this matter. I would like to read a bit more on that blog soon.

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