How to Make a One-of-a-Kind, Personalized Father's Day Photo Collage Memory Frame, a Gift Idea

My mother tells me a week before Father's Day that she thinks it would be a good present for my dad if we make him a picture with a frame that is similar to a collage of photos. And when she says 'we' she actually meant mostly me. So we talked about it for a while and came up with a few ideas and then settled on our materials.

We needed a big picture frame, at least 24 inches or so and it needed a piece of glass. I thought this would make it look better (re: more professional) than just photos glued to poster board. The frame could be new or used as long as it was big.

We also needed colored markers, stickers, tape, glue, scissors, magazines, butcher block paper, black electrical and duct tape plus our imaginations.

My mother found a used picture with glass and an oak frame at a yard sale for a couple of dollars. It had an old picture that was sun-faded and it had a blue mat around the picture itself but that was also sun-faded. At first I thought that I wouldn't be able to use it but then I had the brilliant idea of cutting pictures out of magazines, along with words and then I would glue them to the mat itself. I figured that I had nothing to lose since it had come with the picture anyway.

I spent an hour or so going through just one magazine and I found enough pictures and words to fill the entire mat. I did have to remember to tell myself that this was a gift for my father and not for me so some words and pictures I did have to throw out as being not man appropriate. After I cut them out, I laid them all out so I could look them over and try to get an idea of how I wanted to glue them to the mat.

I started gluing pictures only first and I started in the top corner and worked my way around the mat. I didn't worry about perfect edges because they were not going to show. Once I finished gluing on all the pictures, I started gluing words on top of the pictures. Usually it was just one word such as "life," "good," "hello," "smile" but sometimes I put them together to make a phrase such as "about your smart choices," or "life it's about you, big boy." I tried to keep it fun and clean.

Once I was finished with all the pictures and the words, I got the black electrical tape out. I used the black electrical tape as a border on the inside edge of the mat to hide the exposed part of the sun-faded mat piece and to hide the raw edges of the pictures. I was going to use the gray duct tape but I preferred how the black electrical tape nicely framed and edged the pictures. I also chose to use black electrical tape because it's a man thing. I believe my father will get a kick out the fact that I used it!

I had the frame and glass cleaned up and now I had the mat ready to put in the picture frame. The last thing that I needed to do was to find photos and group them together in a pleasing manner on a piece of what? I decided to use the old picture that was all sun-faded. I just covered it with white butcher block paper, taped it on the backside with the duct tape and I suddenly had a clean new surface to use for my photos.

My mother did come over and she went through pictures with me and chose them. It was easy to think that we needed lots and lots of pictures but it was my opinion that it would look better if we used fewer pictures and then wrote under each one and added stickers around them to make the gift even more personal.

My mother and I decided to stick to an old-fashioned theme for dad so the photos we chose are old family pictures. We chose photos from when my dad was a child, of his mother, when he and my mom first met and married, when he was in the military and home on break from the war with my brother and I as young children and we also chose his prized picture of him and John Wayne from the time that John Wayne visited the Navy ship that dad was on during the war. We chose not to use any current photos.

Once we had the photos that we wanted, we had to arrange them and then tape them down to the white paperboard. We used a small piece of rolled together tape on the backs of each picture to get it to stick in place. After all the pictures were firmly in place, I started writing a thought or caption below each picture. Then we added different stickers including some of Navy military men.

Once everything was done, I put the sheet of photos back into the frame centered inside of my collage mat and taped in place with duct tape and then put the cardboard backing on and stapled it all into place. Now it was complete and ready for gift giving.

It didn't take long to put everything together. All total, I estimate it took me about four hours or so from start to finish to complete this collage frame project. It was inexpensive to make. Plus I recycled the frame and mat by re-purposing it and using photos that I already had which makes it a green gift idea. And I have a one-of-a-kind, personal Father's Day photo collage memory frame for my dad.

My mother even has the perfect spot picked out to hang it - next to dad's computer where he spends so much time playing games!