Coaster Frames

**Edited to add: - the coasters were from Michael's $1 bins.**

Now that this project is with its recipient (Jeanine), I can show it to you! I partly made this for Jeanine because she has 3 cute kids, and I knew they'd look adorable, and partly just because she's such a good friend. Her two older kids are twins and I designed the far left for the boy and the far right for his twin sister. The middle panel is for their little sister. I liked that the twins' panels "shared" the similarity of the striped paper, but then the design diverged (practically on its own) and went their different ways with other paper options.

This is a frame for 3-2" circle photos, one on each piece (which are not shown). The base of this project are three chipboard coasters that I found at Michael's 3/$1. This project did take quite a while, but I think it would go faster now that I've done one. All the paper for the backgrounds were run through my 5" Xyron machine (that Ky bought me approximately 5 years ago(!!), but that hadn't been used much until now). It worked great for this project although I did run out of the Xyron adhesive roll, which Ky graciously picked up a refill for while out on a hardware store run.

The patterned background paper is mostly Petals & Paisleys which will be available in the Spring Mini catalog in March; the leafy green paper is retired SU paper, which I didn't realize until I was done. Most of the stamping is from Polka Dots & Paisley, also in the Spring Mini. The other sets used were for the E/Enjoy image on the far left and is from Be Happy, and the leaves on the center piece under the flowers are from Bodacious Bouquet. The "find joy in the little things" is punched out using the Designer Label punch, then has a 1-1/4" circle of So Saffron behind it and 1-3/8" Mellow Moss circle behind that, and finally, a Certainly Celery piece that was trimmed to outline everything. I thought I had a better resolution picture of this so you could see the detail of it all. If I can find it, I'll re-upload it to this post. I bought the buttons as part of an assorted mix at Archivers and the hinges are, I believe, Making Memories and were found at Michael's or Archivers.

The flowers on the center panel were stamped and then cut out and mounted on white 1-1/4" circles, then Mellow Moss 1-3/8" circles (punched out with SU circle punches). The upper and lower flowers were mounted on one layer of dimensionals and the middle one was mounted using the big, thick glue dots so it would stick up above the other two layers. The ribbon is all SU and is the color that matches Mellow Moss.

I wanted to explain how I got the flowers out of the Polka Dots and Paisley flowers because this is the outline of the flower that I used:

and this (although blurry here) is the round flower that is on the piece:

and I got it by rotating the flower and stamping it three times in a circle, like this:


This method allows even greater flexibility with this cute little outline stamp.