DIY Framed Wall Art Calender - All you need to turn old outdated thrift store paintings into beautiful dry-erase wall calenders!!

How to make a lovely framed calender that looks like a work of art from thrifted frames.

I have had this huge old ugly framed floral print in my craft room for years. I never could throw it out because it seemed like such a waste of an awesome frame! In November I got married and moved into a new house. That means a new craft space. I wanted a huge dry erase calender for the wall to keep my projects right in front of me.

I love how it turned out. Now here's how I did it.

This is what you'll need:

and of course the frame.

Frames are super expensive I have noticed. However the thrift stores are over flowing with people's old prints from the 90's. You could get huge frames for under 5 bucks usually. I got this one, which is 29 1/2 x 23 1/2, from the local homeless shelter by trading them one of my painted canvases and taking this one off their hands.

I don't think it's the print that I hate but the mat. Just not my style. The frame, however, is gorgeous!

So first things first. We gotta take this thing apart. The back usually has some king of paper covering it. once you rip that up, the print is usually just cardboard. Gharrah came to investigate. (:

The print and the glass are generally held in by staples. I just bend those staples all up using a butter knife and see if the guts will come out that way. If you can get it out without removing the staples this will make reassembling it sooooo much easier.

After I had the glass and card board print out of the frame I put the glass somewhere safe, grabbed the frame and headed outside to spray paint it. I love the frame but the yellow gold just wasn't my style. Insetad I toned it down with some champagne spray paint. I let that dry and then sealed it with a clear coat.

I left that to dry and went back inside to start working on the guts of the calender. First I took the print and flipped it over on my desk and covered the back of it with double sided tape.

Then I tool my roll of paper and just rolled it across the taped back of the print. I used a craft colored paper used for mailing things. Depending on the look you are going for, you could use any wrapping paper or bulletin board paper for a background.

Now just flip it over and trim around the edges and you have your foundation.!

Next comes the slightly more difficult part. Math.

You are going to want to measure your frame and then figure out how big you want your calender day squares. I wanted an inch and a half margin around so I subtracted 3 inched from the height and width. Then I wanted to have margins that were a fourth of an inch in between the days so I subtracted another 3 inches from the both the height and the width. I took the width and divided that by 7 (days of the week) and that's how wide my squares are. Height wasn't such a big deal because I wanted space left.

I decided I wanted a colored border around mine so my blue squares are 2 3/4 inches and my white squares are 2 1/2 inches. I also made my day squares a half of an inch longer just because I liked the look of it.

So once you have decided what size to make your squares you will need to cut seven for the days of the week and then 35 for five weeks worth of calender days.

Once I had those cut I used more double sided tape to tape the white squares to the blue.

Then I layed out the days the way I wanted them and began to tape them down. It was around here that I realized I wanted a space or the month. I cut that out and spaced everything accordingly.

Once I had all the days down, I wrote out the days of the week on the top row before I taped them down. I decided to hand write mine but you could use a cricut or sticker letters or even just print them out.

After I taped those down. I just measured what space was left at the bottom and cut out some large solid pieces of card stock that would fit perfect and taped them down as well.

After that you can decide if you want to add decorations or washi tape to it. I wanted mine clean and simple so I left mine minimal and slid the glass and then the calender back into place.