Cottagey shadowboxes

Somehow the month of July seems to have flown by. For much of the month we were down to one child as Cal spent a couple of weeks at summer camp and then Matthew went to New Brunswick with my mother. For five glorious days Alan and I were home alone. We were working hard, but we also had time to visit some of the great restaurants that have sprung up in our neighbourhood over the last couple of years.

We're back to the incessant bickering reality now.

Anyway, I promised Matthew that this summer we would decorate his bedroom at the cottage. The walls are painted plain old beige, and there's not much hanging on them. He chose blue for the wall colour, and I've been brainstorming inexpensive cottage-themed art to hang.

At the beginning of the summer I picked up a few antique fishing lures. Since Matthew is crazy about fishing, they seemed like a good choice for his room.

Last week I picked up a few shadowboxes at Dollarama. When I got them home the openings in them weren't quite the right size, so I pulled them all apart. Luckily the inner frame was made of plastic and was easy to snap apart.

I hot glued the glass directly to the frame, and then glued the pieces of the inner frame to the main frame to hold the back of the box in the correct place. Then I mounted the lures on some cardstock and put the frames all together - and realized that I'd bought one black and two dark brown frames. Doh!

Yesterday I finally went back and picked up two more black frames and finished up this project that had been hanging about in my dining room for weeks.

This wooden lure is my favourite of the three. 

Since I had to pick up a couple of extra boxes and I had the ugly brown ones left over, I decided to try to rescue them with some paint. I had a can of high gloss yellow from a previous project that I figured would brighten the frames up so I got to work painting.

Then there was the hunt to find something to frame. Rooting through Cal's room I found some Playmobile pirates that Janine bought for the kids a couple of years ago for a treasure hunt at Grandma's camp. And they were the perfect size!

I love the bright canary yellow frames and vibrant colours in the pirates - they make Matthew's fishing lures look dingy by comparison. I think I might have to pick up some bright red spray paint to brighten Matthew's up.