Photo art - the L'Amour edition

I've never had my pockets bulging with money, so to spice up my living spaces I have to come up with things that will feel like home and not feel like "ow" to my wallet. One of my favorite ways to do that is through photos.

I have seen a home where tiny, regular sized photos in frames are...well...cluttering up an entire wall. Not exactly what I had in mind by homey! I didn't want to spend a lot of money on having enlargements made either. Instead, I took my photo to the local copy shop and had color photo copy enlargement made of a photo of a certain mountain meadow in my favorite camping spot.

Nowadays (am I old enough to say that?) photo enlargements aren't so spendy or difficult to come by, but they can sometimes add bulk to a project that will really cramp my creative style; so color photo copies are still my favorite way to go!

Well I have photos all over the place, how do I make it different and interesting? As Hamlet said, "Words, words, words!"

I took one of my favorite Louis L'Amour quotes and had the print shop print it on a piece of vellum which was standard paper size (this would be easy enough to do at home). Then I lay the vellum quote over the photo, cut a ribbon border to cover the seams of the the obvious "hey there's a coupla pieces of paper in this frame" and put them all in a frame that I either got at Goodwill or on clearance (my frame choices are always those options!) and backed it all with black paper.

And you're done! Nearly instant art for nearly no money.

And because I doubt your eyes work well enough to read it from the photo, here's the quote I used, which is from Treasure Mountain of the Sackett series:

I don't know what you are wishful for in this life, but you set down of a night and you pray to God that he'll let you walk alone across a mountain meadow when the wild flowers are blooming.

You pray he'll let you set by a mountain stream with the sunlight falling through the aspens, or that he'll let you ride across an above-timberline plateau with the strong bare peaks around you and the black thunderheads gathering around them - great, swelling rain clouds ready to turn the meadows into a swamp in a minute or two...you let him show you those things, and you'll never miss heaven if you don't make it.

There's majesty in those peaks, and grandeur in the clouds, and there's a far and wonderful beauty in the distance.