A super easy Valentine's Day backdrop for under $3.00? Yes, please!
When you buy a 100 year old house, and you begin renovating and updating, you find that you have lots of scrap materials left over. Baseboards, trim, mouldings, wainscoting, everything. In an effort to cut our expenses this year (that's one of our 2013 business goals!), we've been looking for ways to switch things up without overspending on expensive backdrops and props, re-use items that we already have at the studio and recycle leftover materials from other projects that we do - which in turn, does require a bit of creativity and craftiness! But I promise, it's super easy!
Materials:
Streamers in multiple colors (we chose pink, red & white to fit our theme)
4-10 ft. leftover scrap wood (we had a 9 ft. long 2 in. piece of trim leftover from renovations)
Stapler (and staples!)
Tape Measurer
1. Decide what length you're going for. 99% of our sessions are children 4 feet and under, so we went with 4 feet.
2. There's two ways to go about measuring - we measured our length on the floor and put a piece of tape to mark it so we wouldn't have to measure every cut, however you could choose to guesstimate and just level them off by cutting the bottom to length (think haircut, haha) once you've finish and got your backdrop hung up. We wanted different lengths for a layered look, so we cut near the tape mark and left everything uneven in the end.
3. Wrap the edge of streamer over your wood so that it's completely wrapped around the wood, overlapping and staple. Simple!
4. Space your first color so that you can come in and fill in with your second and third colors.
5. Once you've got one layer all the way across, come back in and staple a contrasting color in the spaces between your first layer (to fill in the cracks). We chose to cut this layer a bit shorter for a layered effect.
6. That's it! We used large clamps and clamped our backdrop (by the wood) to the stand that we already had. We also used a 3 foot piece of baseboard and twine for a Kissing Booth sign that we had leftover, and some other props that we already had. Okay, so I went out and bought the cute wooden letters to spell "LOVE" at Michael's, but you can justify that by purchasing an "N" at the same time and they're reusable - you can reuse the "O" and the "E", add the "N" and spell "ONE" for first birthday sessions :)
Here's how our backdrop turned out...super easy, super cute, and under $3.00!
