Hawaii Gallery

Eric and I spent our honeymoon on the gorgeous island of Kauai. Even though my poor husband broke his ankle on the way there, he was a total trooper, and we had a wonderful time. I am definitely planning to write about it sometime soon (and our wedding too!), but for now I will showcase one of my favorite souvenirs! I *love* postcards, and no matter where I go, I always have my eye out for good ones. I think this may be due in part to having visited a lot of museums in my youthful days: I didn’t have a good enough camera to take pictures, and I couldn’t afford much of anything in the gift shops. Except the postcards, the glorious glorious postcards! I have them stashed all over the house: in books, on the fridge, lining the walls. They are little tangible slices of memory, and I never tire of that.

Hawaii was no exception to this rule: everywhere we went, I saw these gorgeous reproductions of vintage postcards. I found two pretty packs full of them at the airport just before our flight home–sweet serendipity!

I have been wanting to put them up on the walls since we moved here, so I assembled a nice pile of unfinished wood frames that cost roughly a dollar each, and I set about painting them. (As a side note, kudos to Ikea for naming their frame “Ram,” which is close to the Russian word for frame and thus makes me smile).

I laid them out on a section of the newspaper that I had no real need for (sorry, sports!), and got to work. I wanted to arrange about ten of these frames, and I decided to paint three of them silver, three black, three brown, and one cream, which would be the centerpiece.

A few of these guys needed two coats of paint (the cream especially), but mostly it was a quick job.

Rather hilariously, the brown I came up with was really almost indistinguishable from the black. I could have put a lighter coat on it, but I decided in the end that perhaps I was subconsciously channeling Hawaiian Koa wood, so I went with it.

Once the frames were finished drying, I started pairing the postcards with the frame colors. I laid all of them out on a white posterboard and rearranged them several times until I was happy with the overall look. And then I hung them right up! A quick and easy project that makes our hallway more colorful, and more suffused with happy sunny memories.