Quick custom wall frame

I took a photo of a place that is special to me and had it enlarged, but was having trouble finding a suitable frame for it. I got tired of it being stuck to the wall with BluTak so, I made a frame. This was one of those projects that went from idea to completion in the span of an evening.

This is a really simple little thing that you can knock together in less than an hour, and it's really cheap. The photo or poster is held in place by strong magnets. I picked these up at Home Depot for about $1.69 for 12. All of the other materials were already on hand.

For mine, I used scrap 1x2 furring strips. Simply measure the dimensions of your poster, and use a hand mitre saw to cut four pieces with the ends at 45 degree angles; the angles should open away from each other on each piece of wood - each of your side pieces will make a trapezoid shape, not a parallelogram. The length of the wood on the short side of each parallelogram should correspond to the the size of your opening.

Cutting the 45 angles with my little mitre box.

My photo is 20" x 30". Here's where I went wrong and had to dismantle the whole thing: I made the inside of the frame 20" x 30". The problem is that then there was no overlap. Now, this didn't twig until I went to attach the poster, so then I had to cut my lovely joints apart and make my angled cuts all over again.

To assemble the frame, just apply some wood glue to the edges and a finish nail at each corner. My wood was quite tough, so I had to pre-drill my holes with a 1/16 bit. I used some Gorilla glue to attach a magnet to each corner. I put a piece of newspaper between my magnet and my clamp while the glue dried, just to make sure that I didn't accidentally glue the clamp to the frame - that stuff will hold anything.

While the glue dried, I put scraps in each corner to make sure that it stayed square in case it got bumped. I'm clumsy. 

I liked the unfinished look of the wood with the photo, but the frame would also look great stained or painted. My scraps were two colors, so I did one color for the sides and the other for the top and bottom. For hanging, I had one of those picture hanging sets languishing in a drawer. You know the ones that never have enough of the right pieces to hang things, so you end up with a random assortment of eye hooks and no nails. I screwed two of the eye hooks into the top of the frame and  strung some wire from the kit through them. You could also attach the wire along the back to keep it out of sight, but I wanted a more industrial look for this frame.