Love Notes: DIY Art

Among my gifts for my 30th birthday was a very sentimental surprise from my sweet hubby.  Josh had written me 30 notes, one for each day, each detailing a simple reason he loves me.  Let me stress that this is VERY unusual for my husband to do.  Of all the good qualities my husband possesses, romantic and/or expressive is not one of them.  So needless to say, I was in love with my gift and his gesture.
My birthday was way back in March, and for awhile, I just hung on to the notes because I didn't quite know what to do with them.  I obviously didn't want to throw them away.  But I really didn't want to store them away somewhere either because then they would just get mixed in with the other clutter.  And then one day it hit me that they would make the perfect piece of art for our bedroom.
When I found a spare frame laying around one day, I knew it was time to get to work.  My original plan was to place cork behind the mat, cover it with scrapbook paper, and thumbtack each note in a collage-ish way to the cork (for which I had all supplies on hand...SCORE!).  This worked from a technical standpoint, but not an aesthetic one:

Because my notes took up so much space, the scrapbook paper got completely covered up, leaving me with a very white creation!  I'm normally all for white, but wanted a little bit of color and spunk on this guy.  Luckily, I also had a piece of scrapbook paper left over from my Mom's coasters I had DIYed at the holidays.  So, I whipped out some mod podge and got to work covering my white mat with the scrapbook paper.  After about 2 minutes of work, I was much more pleased with the result.  I had originally planned on leaving the glass top off, but decided to put it back in, mainly because I could.  Here it is hanging gloriously in our bedroom.

And in case you want to catch a non close-up glimpse:

I am pretty pleased with this simple (and free!) project!  I really love that I now get to glance at Josh's affections each and every day.  It's particularly fun because each day I seem to read a different one.