Surprise

Steve is playing in the US Pond Hockey Tournament again this weekend. He took a half day today from work, and while he was gone I set out on making him a surprise. He's still not home, so we'll see if he notices once he gets home.

A long time ago he mentioned how he wanted his hockey jerseys framed some time. I've looked and they're at least $60 a piece for true jersey frames, the ones I found at Michael's were on sale for $60, regularily $120 and I need at least 3 of them.

I traded on my cloth diaper forum for a Michael's gift card, so I had some spending money there and decided to try to diy the jersey frame a bit to be cheaper. They had huge poster frames on sale for about $22 each, they only had two, so I only got two jerseys done, but I'll do the rest some other time. I wanted to make sure it would work first.

So what I did was buy the huge 27"x40" poster frames and two yards of black flannel. I used double sided tape and taped the flannel onto the back of the poster frame. Then I laid out the jersey on top of the flannel and sandwiched it inside the poster frame. It's a tight fit, but it works. Totally not perfect, but I'm cheap and I am not spending $60 on one frame!

Of course Annamarie decided she wanted to be a little helper like always and took her wooden puzzle pieces and banged them on the plastic fronts so there are some scratches if you look closely and the sun is shining on them. Sigh. I've come to realize you kind of have to set your expectations a bit lower if she's around "helping", otherwise I just get frustrated.

So, anyways, I framed his college jersey and above that I hung a hockey stick that is from the Wisconsin Badgers hockey team, his college teammate works for them now and gave us that as a wedding gift.


Across the room above the futon is another one of his jerseys. I'm not completely sure which team this was, but I do know his team won State when he was on it. The hockey stick on the left is from that team with all his teammates signatures on it. On the right is a Wild hockey stick from when he was little. (the sticks are on the wall with those velcro 3M sticky strips, they worked perfectly!)


Now I just need to wait until Michael's gets more frames in and then I can frame his high school jersey as well.