My DIY frame disaster

I’ve had the idea for a large scale frame collage DIY project for a long time now.  I finally gathered all the materials I needed and collected wooden frames from various rummage sales and thrift stores and decided to dig in tonight.  It shouldn’t take long, I thought, it’s a pretty straight forward project... 

I really like collage frames.  I really like my canopy bed.  There is a perfect spot for a great big collage frame right up above my headboard.  Trouble is, there is no large scale collage frame anywhere that is both white and not insanely expensive.  So I decided to make my own by nailing a bunch of frames together in a cool pattern.  Easy shmeezy, right?

Now, for those of you professionals with more experience and know-how you are perhaps thinking, “ah, silly, silly girl.”  Or something of that nature.  Maybe you know something I still don’t know about wooden frames, nails and hammering.  I have to admit that I really don’t know what went wrong, exactly.  I am blaming defective nails.  Or defective frames.  Or both.  

The first nail I placed struck true all to easily.  “It’s working!  It’s really working!” I thought to myself, “I might have to fabricate mistakes for my ‘mistake blog’!”  

Famous last words.  

That first nail gave my a completely unfair false sense of confidence.  Honestly, and this is no exaggeration here, about 80% of the nails I attempted to hammer into the frames bent into squiggly shapes after only a few swipes with the hammer.  Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but nails are not supposed to collapse limply like spaghetti noodles.  I’m pretty sure my frames were the normal run of the mill wood variety, not steel or concrete.  Yet, for some reason unbeknownst to me, these nails continued to bend stubbornly beyond all recognition.  

You’d think after the first 50 or so I would give up and grab the trusty glue gun (which I love and appreciate even more now).  But I persisted, and finally had enough nails clinging desperately between frames to competently hold them all together.  This after my quick 15-20 minute project evolved into a horrendous hour-long ordeal.  

I decided to place one more nail for good measure - I’m sure you can see where this is headed - and to my chagrin missed the nail completely and instead hammered my thumb.  It has been years since I had a blood blister, and this one is a doozy.  Of course, this brings to mind the last time I got a blood blister, which, ironically enough, also involved a hammer (although I wasn’t the one doing the hammering).  

I was about 7 years old and the neighbor boy and I were pretending to mine and polish jewels (which were really the white landscaping rocks outside my parents’ house).  He would break them open with a hammer and I would wash (or polish) each broken rock to make it shine.  Putting a large hammer in the hands of a 7 year old boy is a recipe for disaster anyway, but this kid was smash happy.  I carefully reached for a broken rock at the same moment he brought his mining tool down and - BAM!  Instant blood blister.

I should have learned my lesson then.  I should have known that hammers and I should never mix.  I should have realized this idea was flawed from the outset.  

But to make matters even worse, after enlisting the help of my husband to move the large monstrosity of a framework upstairs (as it turned out much more frail and delicate than I had anticipated), I discovered that it was too wide for the opening between my bed’s posts.  Yes, seriously.  So, I’ve put the project to bed for the night and will resurrect it again when I have more stamina.  And as I am never one to back down from a challenge - it WILL be completed. One way or another.

The moral?  Measure twice, hammer never.  

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