The Peachtree Press: What To Make a Father for Christmas

This is always a dilemma. What do you get for dad? The problem is extrapolated when you have decided to make all of your Christmas gifts. I had absolutely no idea what I could possibly make my father that would turn out to be anything he would enjoy.

And then I realized, knowing my dad and his total oblivion of any sort of interior decorating, he probably had nothing up on the walls of his office.

So I made him some art.

I started with two hideous frames one of my best friends had salvaged for me from the duplex next door, which is being totally remodeled after the tenant of thirty-some years moved out. The landlord was going to throw them away. "Sarah can use these," said my friend, and, just like that, they were mine.

She was right. I could use them; but they took a lot of work. They were awful. I bent up the staples holding the pictures in place and removed the pictures and the matting. I used a flat-headed screw driver to pry up the staples.

I cleaned the "glass," which turned out to be some sort of thick plastic. Almost better. I couldn't break it.

I removed some random nails from the wood frames (they were not performing any conceivable function, I have no idea who in their right minds would have nailed them in), laid them on garbage bags, and painted them gray.

I used this paint and I applied two coats. I must say, they looked pretty good.

Due to time constraints (and poor drawing skills), I decided to hunt for an old book I could cut up and use the illustrations to fill the frames. My dad works for a large-scale construction company, so I wanted something architecturally based. The find: an incredibly tall, skinny book about skyscrapers around the world. $9 at Half Price Books. Perfect! Love that place.

I cut out the pictures I wanted, as well as the names of the towers and the interesting facts about them: when they were completed, how tall they are, etc. I glued them to poster board using a spray adhesive--fortunately, I had a friend with me who had used spray adhesive before, or I would have turned it into a disaster. My idea was to lay the pieces upside-down on a garbage bag in the garage, spray them liberally, pick them up, and place them where I wanted on the poster board.

This would have resulted in a sticky, gooey, horrible mess. I had two poster boards worth of pictures to spray, but after the first batch the garbage bag would have been a tacky from the spray adhesive, and I would have had to place the next pictures exactly where the old ones had been, or I would be headed for trouble.

Instead, my friend told me to put the poster board on the garbage bag, arrange the pictures exactly how I wanted, and then spray each piece on at a time, holding it up in the air to spray it before placing it back in its place on the poster. It worked beautifully.

Unfortunately, no pictures were taken of this endeavor, due to the fact that it was, by my best estimates, -30 in the garage while we were working.

We stuck the corners of the poster on the plastic with mod podge. NOT a good idea. It never really dried clear, and you could see it through the plastic like a dark smudge. I wish we would have sprayed just the corners with the spray adhesive and stuck the pictures on that way. Oh, well!

I replaced the plastic in the frames and bent the staples back down tightly on top of it.

I put command strips on the top two corners so they would be all ready for him to hang. These are the best kind for hanging anything like this--one sticks to the picture, one sticks to the wall, and they velcro together to hold the picture up. Perfect!

I like to velcro two pieces together, place them where I want on the back of the picture, and then stick them to the wall, just so I know each strip is exactly where I want it.

I thought the finished products looked pretty good. My father agreed. Here, we have Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, and the Woolworth Building.