Vintage Sheet Music Frame

Recently, I scored a LOT of vintage sheet music at an estate sale of a world-famous pianist. This stuff has gorgeous artwork, is beautifully aged, has handwritten notes, and...wait for it...wait...is entirely in another language! It's beautiful stuff!

any fans of Laurell K Hamilton out there?

Some of it isn't in booklet form and are just random sheets; still beautiful, but it doesn't seem wrong to decoupage it. It's ok, there's two wine crates full of this stuff:

Sheet music upcycling has already been done in bloggy-land, and done well, but I wanted to try my hand at it. A good friend gave me some picture frames from her 'donate' pile as she thought I could do something with them. Well, when I pulled one out the other day to work with it - it was a frame her godson gave her and it had a hand-written note on the back.

Perfect! She was getting it back (she used the photo that was in it - she's a good godmother), and hopefully, wouldn't want to donate it now that it was upcycled.

I'll spare you the priming and painting of the frame and go right to the sheet music:

I tore the sections - what are they called? stanzas popped into my head - by hand as I wanted an even more aged look:

I placed it on some artist board that had been painted with a tan paint (an earlier project that was, um, being procrastinated on):

This got decoupaged down to the canvas board. I knew a stencil was going on top, so out came the letters. I thought about putting just a simple fleur-de-lis stencil on it but that's my style, not my friend's. A simple 'FRIENDS' message was just right. I planned it all out scientifically, and started stenciling:

Planning it all out

Notice anything missing? Yep. People, measurements are not my strong point. When I got to the 'S', it was not going to work...this works just as well, right? Ah well, it's the thought that counts, right?

It was looking a little empty, so here's another bloggy project that's out there everywhere - flowers out of book pages:

After cutting them out and inking the edges, all it took was a little hot glue and a broken jewelry piece, and voila! a pretty simple, quick project! Oh, and if you don't have vintage sheet music just laying around, go to The Graphics Fairy - she has awesome graphics for you to download and use for free!

The finished project. Hope Sue likes it!

Go forth and decoupage!