Using Personal Keys To Make Shadowbox Art: a house log

Last week during the blogiversary madness, there were requests for more fast & *nearly* free projects – especially the ones that renters and homeowners alike can whip out in under an hour. So here is an under $10 project that I took ten minutes, tops.

Do you get the hidden meaning behind the keys? Look a little closer. See how there is one tall key, one medium key, and two small keys (one of which is horizontal while one’s vertical)? Well, that is our little key family. Haha. Burger’s the horizontal guy.

When I saw a bowl of keys for $2 at an antique store on the way home from Granny’s, I stared at them for a while, literally thinking “what can I do with these?” When I saw some big ones and some small ones, it came to me. Why not get a daddy key, a momma key, a Clara key, and a Burger key? So eight bucks later I had my little key “muses” at home on my desk in a pile. It took me a few weeks to get to the craft store to grab some pleasant thick wood-grain-ish paper (I ended up finding it Michaels for 60 cents), which I chose would make a lively natural background for my rustic little old keys. So I got it home and cut it down to fit into the Ikea frame that I already had on hand.

Then I simply taped the paper in place behind the mat (which came with the frame).

Next I laid out the keys in height order, and tipped the Burger key over since that is more like his shape. After snickering for a minute at my little key family (yeah, I am that ridiculous) I grabbed some Gorilla Glue and put a few dollops on the back of each key and pressed them down into the paper so they’d dry in that layout. You might want to do this on top of cardboard or a dropcloth, simply in case the glue bleeds through the paper (ya do not want to glue everything to the table/counter).

Oh and to anyone at home trying to glue something slightly heavy like a metal key to something, the key is to get thick sufficient paper – or if you have thin paper, try backing it with something thicker (like gluing it to cardboard or card stock) to stabilize it so it’ll hold those metal keys without buckling or sagging. Thankfully our paper was pleasant and thick- sort of like card stock.

Ta-daaa. The lively part about this was that it was so swift and straightforward that if we should ever add another little one (pooch or human) to the pack, I can consistently pop these off of the paper, choose a new background in any print or pattern, and grab a few more old keys at a thrift or antique store to glue on.

Oh and you can kind of tell from the picture, but there is still glass in the frame. I wondered if the keys would be too thick for the glass to work (in which case I simply would have used the frame without the glass, so they would be 3-D/exposed in the front) but I simply tried securing the back of the frame with the glass in there and it latched, so it is pleasant to know that I will not have dust collecting on the keys. But if you have a more shallow frame that does not allow the glass to remain once you add the thickness of the keys, getting a shadow box or simply removing the glass is consistently an option.

As for where we hung it, the wall in the laundry room right next to the door that we go in and out of everyday seemed like a pleasant spot since that is where we have a few go-to personal/family pics along with other randomly meaningful items…

… like an iron bee hook that reminds us of the bees on our wedding invites and a metal 7, which is a nod to our wedding date (we in fact picked that up at a local outlet, The Decorating Outlet, this weekend and I hung it when I hammered in my key art).

 

What are you folks popping into frames lately? Do not you enjoy that you can grab cool textured paper like the wood grain stuff that we used? I am a glad camper in that paper aisle, I am telling ya. Do any of you have old skeleton keys that in fact work in a door or two in your home? That has consistently been a dream of mine. Well, that and living in the paper aisle…