Shell Frame

I saw a picture frame on sale at Home Goods (my favorite store) for $3.00.  It was white washed, with some imperfections, which didn't matter, because I wanted to customize a frame with seashells for an ocean themed room decoration.  I forgot to take progressive photos from the beginning, so there's none of the original bargain white-washed frame before I started gluing shells. 

Such a deal !!!

The shells were recently collected at a Southern California beach, where I saw a lot of shells with orange and gold tones washed ashore that day, so I tried to stick with that color theme in gathering as many as possible together with white shells.  All you need is a glue gun to attach shells to the frame.  I did a rough layout first for the corner shells and then started gluing and layering in between.  As you can see below, there were some gaps where the original white-washed frame was still visible ... so I kept layering smaller shells on top to fill in these areas. 

Starting to fill in the corner

 The wonderful quality of a glue gun is that you can easily move a shell before the glue hardens, pull off the glue and start all over in readhering the shell until you like the placement and results.  Here is the finished product where I've added an ocean picture of Hamoa Beach from our trip to Hawaii last year.





The beach and ocean theme is endless... aloha!



If you like the sand-filled antique bottle, I bought it from MerMade Designs, and Merideth has loads of great ocean themed gift decor.  This bottle is actually filled with sand from Hawaii, which makes it reminiscent of a great vacation. Merideth even customized some of her vintage bottles for us and filled them with black and red sand we brought back from Maui. 

This ocean themed decor lets me escape back to Hawaii for a few moments every day.