Paint Chip Art

Paint chip art is popping up everywhere these days.

From Pinterest

And since we've collected quite a few paint chips this year at Home Depot, we thought we'd give it a try too!  We haven't changed up the pictures in our apartment for a few years so we were both looking forward to something new.  Young House Love and Bower Power's current Pinterest Challenge was definitely a motivator too!

We spent a lot of time coming up with a design.  Our paint chips were all variations of three colors: pink, green, and blue.  So we decided we wanted some sort of swirl pattern out of the pink-toned paint chips and that the blue and green would be filler colors.  It took some playing around with different patterns but we eventually came up with something we liked:

After determining the layout, we flipped each paint chip over individually, cut them to ensure they were all the same size, and taped them together on the back.  The cuts weren't perfect (I really wish I had one of those paper cutters that teachers use) but that's okay - it looks homemade!

Next we waited until I found the perfect frame - at Unique!  Unique is an awesome thrift store in Northern Virginia.  I was there with friends to find 80s clothes for a costume and just happened to walk by a $3.99 picture frame that looked like the perfect size.  Hooray!

After I cleaned it up with Windex I realized that there was no way to take the frame apart.  Well, there probably is but I couldn't figure it out!  So my husband used an knife to cut open the cardboard in the back and pull it out of the frame.  Except it wasn't just cardboard!  There were plastic layers between different layers of really thick, unbendable cardboard.

But eventually we got it and were able to slip our art inside.  Then we just taped one layer of cardboard on the back to keep our art in place.  Here's the final product: