so i have a bunch of these bee paintings, and when i made them, i was just trying to use up these
little pieces of plywood that i had. i had to glued little picture holders to the back of them
because where they were hanging was just a nail in the wall situation and that was totally fine,
but i'm hoping to take these to a gallery that uses a slat wall installation, which means that
it's going to be on big hooks. i thought i'd try my hand at making little frames for them,
but most instructions are for floating frames, and they're usually on canvases or thicker wood panels
like this that actually have substance on the side where you can actually nail pieces of wood
and glue things, and these tiny little bees, they don't have any substance to the side of them where
i can really attach them to anything, so i need to find a way to make a little frame to surround
them and give them a bit more depth so i can hang wires on them, and i need to find a way to
attach them to the frame. so i'm going to start by measuring each and every one of these because
they are all randomly cut and not exactly the same size, of course. because i'm using a little miter
box that has the 45 degree angle set to it, i'm not going to have to do any math for this
which is great. so starting with this piece of oak that i have already cut at a 45 degree angle,
i'm going to measure the inside measurement to match the side that i'm working on on the little
bee painting. so we decided on this piece of oak edging, something or other, and this was
the closest thing to what i had in my mind. this was so hard to cut, and the pieces are so small
that i couldn't actually lock anything into the miter box, so we definitely had to improvise with
some clamps. we also tried to use an electric sawzall to get this cut, and that was much faster,
but it was just more chaotic and unpleasant. it is a very nice strong piece of wood and it's
kind of an interesting pattern to it, but it was a miserable process trying to cut these. i certainly
wasn't able to finish all of these by the end of this video. i'm sanding down all the rough edges
and just kind of seeing how they fit together. these little pieces of wood aren't perfectly
straight or anything, so this is pretty much as good as i could get. again, it was really nice to
not have to do any math for this because the miter box kind of just did all the work for me. i wanted
to try this trick where you just line the pieces up in order onto a piece of tape, put some wood
glue in there, and then just roll it up. this is a very small square, so i'm just kind of hoping that
the edges are square. i was mostly successful, but you know, i bungled a few of them for sure.
again, because the bees don't really have much on the side of them to glue anything to,
we decided to add a couple of pieces of soft craft wood, and glue that exactly
where i thought it needed to be in order for the painting to sit into it at a nice depth,
so it's almost kind of like a floating frame, but i wasn't really going for the look of one.
i discovered that for these, if i laid two little popsicle sticks on the inside and sat the little
pieces of wood on top of it, it was exactly a very good height for holding my bees in,
sort of inset, not quite flush the edge, but not too deep either. making do with some clamping
action here until the whole thing dries. one step i didn't show because it was late at night, i did
go in with wood filler and fill in the cracks in the corners to make it look less ragged,
and then i sanded them down the next day, after which i took them outside and started to add
this nice red chestnut stain to it, let it sit on the wood surface for a little while, and then
rub it off with a paper towel very thoroughly. you'll definitely see where i did not apply and
remove the wood filler in a timely fashion. i didn't sand it enough. i should have just
put the filler into the crack and then cleaned it off immediately, because you'll see where the wood
filler had touched the wood and sort of sealed it so that there are parts of the wood that's not
quite holding the stain very well. so now i got this little frame, it looks a little bit rough,
but it does seem to be kind of functional. i'm putting my painting back in there to try to figure
out which way is up because like i said, these little pieces of plywood that i painted on are
not exactly square. so once i figured out which way is up, i'm just going to go ahead and add
some strings to it so i don't have to do it later, and i'm just going to use the little eyelet hooks
for this and some really good fishing line. then it's just a matter of gluing my bees in.
this whole process, i knew it wasn't going to be very easy, and it certainly makes me regret
making art on little pieces of plywood. it created so much work later. i'm also just really happy to
see how pretty my little bees are all dressed up and ready to go. i hope you can learn from
a few of my mistakes, like maybe choosing wood that isn't going to give you so much grief,
sanding a lot more? if you see anything else and you have some great advice,
please share in the comments so other people can learn from it, and thank you so much for watching.