Sprucing up a wall photo

I'm always decorating and redecorating my house.  Constantly.  This time it's the wall in my living room.  It's the first thing you notice when you walk in my house.  So it's where I like to put our family photos.  I had awesome ones taken by a friend last year. Even with having it printed at 16x20 it still looked puny on the big old wall.  So I had to do something to give it more presence.  


I put the photo in a thrift store frame and mounted it onto another board.  I love the way it turned out!


I started with a large piece of birch plywood (I think that's what it's called) that was cut at Lowes.


I painted it Old White with Annie Sloan Chalkboard paint.  (As a side note, this is the first time I've used AS paint.  It was amazing.  No priming and even coverage.  Love it!)


I taped off some stripes with Frog Tape (that's an affiliate link).  


Then painted it with a blue sample I picked up when I got the wood.  Sorry for the blurry pic.  I tried to retake it but I spilled the paint and it wiped off all of the writing on the sticker.  After the paint dried, I sanded the wood with my handy little mouse sander.


The frame was from my stash.  It's had many lives.  It started black; it's been red and now it's white.  I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of using it before for my family photo because it serendipitously fit it perfectly. 


I struggled a little with how to attach the frame to the board because I wanted it to be removable to change the photo.  I decided to put picture hangers on the board...


and stapled some ribbon onto the back of the frame.


The ribbon on the back of the frame hangs onto the picture hooks on the board.  It  works out really well.   The red theme in our photo doesn't match the blue frame very well, but we are close to having photos taken again, so I'm leaving it this way for now.


I like the layers of the frame on top of the board.  I think it makes it more interesting! 


And it gives a smaller photo a lot of presence on a large wall!