Thursday, February 24, 2011

Stuff on the walls - Part II

A couple of months ago, Matt found this sweet Typographic Map of Chicago on zazzle.com for a mere $30.  And, it's HUGE!  It's just shy of measuring in a 2 ft x 3 ft.  We thought it was super interesting. 
The map has been sitting rolled up in a corner of our kitchen for a couple of months while we argued about discussed where to hang it and how to frame it.  Last week, Michaels was having a 60% custom framing sale and we were totally inspired by the rest of our new wall decor, so loaded up our map and headed over there.  I was so amped to get this thing framed that I started taking pictures as we were walking into Michaels!
 

About 30 minutes later, we had selected a pretty, simple white wood frame and a gray/green/blue mat.  The picture below doesn't really capture the color of the mat accurately, but I only had my phone on me.

I'll update with pictures in two weeks when it's all done and back in our home.

4 comments:

Chardonnay said...

That map is super cool! Would you mind sharing how much it cost to frame a picture that size at Michael's? I have several pieces that I need to have framed... of course I'll wait for the sale :)

Laurie said...

Hi Chardonnay!

Michaels's actually uses a tiered system of pricing for their frames. We picked a yellow band frame (which was right in the middle as far as prices go) and a specialty mat (also in the middle). It ran us about $175. It was more than I was expecting to pay, but it will look so great when it's done. We were looking at a frame in the cheapest tier too, and that would have been more like $130. It also would have been cheaper if we didn't use glass (which I learned a lot of people do for maps), but we thought it looked fancier with the glass.

Laurie said...

Sorry! One more option to add. Michael's did have some large scale frames on sale for around $40-$70 on their racks (by the custom framing counter, but not custom). Most of those frames didn't have mats and they didn't have a style that really appealed to us for this project. But if you found one you liked in that section, you could probably save a small fortune buying a frame and getting a custom mat or something.

Chardonnay said...

Thanks :) That's more than I was hoping to hear, but not too surprising. I'm going to try to find some old frames at thrift stores first. Maybe paint them and just have them matted at Michael's or somewhere similar...