Framed Valentine's Photo Gift using Imagine

Well, I finally set about making a gift for my wonderful hubby at 4pm yesterday (Valentine's Day)!  Poor guy!  It's like the carpenter whose house is always in disrepair....the good stuff always goes to others instead of the ones closest to us. 

I've had this idea in my head since I found these frames at Michaels' for $1 each.  They're 8x10 frames, kind of a rustic bamboo finish.  I wanted to do something similar to what I've seen the Word Collage cartridge used for - a background for a layout which is made to fit a standard size frame.  I actually have the Word Collage cartridge, but it won't work in my Imagine.  I guess I need to do ANOTHER update....and I'm afraid to do that with the hiccups that the updates have had lately.  So, I'll just work around it for now.

I used the Graphically Speaking cart for the background.  I added some 1" squares to the image window, and fiddled with the number and size of the squares until everything lined up the way that I wanted.  Then, I changed my settings on my machine to "print only" and the border setting to "0" before printing the page onto a standard 12x12 piece of white paper. 

I cut out the red hearts at 1" from my Plantin Schoolbook cartridge, and then cut out the "me & you" from black vinyl at 2.5" and put it on the front of the glass.  The photo was taken at my husband's company Christmas party this past December. 

I made the milk carton house from the Sweet Tooth Boxes cartridge, then did a color fill using a pattern from the Good Old Days cartridge.  Cute, huh?