Why search endlessly for the perfect prints to frame, when you can make your own?

As we were muscling through the absolutely soul-shattering process of painting our entire house in about a week, our go-to Pandora station was the 80s. (I can neither confirm nor deny that a paintbrush was used as a microphone at some point). We were painting our dining room one night when ‘West End Girls’ by Pet Shop Boys came on.

I love Pet Shop Boys, and as I listened to the song, my brain gave birth to this crazy idea: what if I made side-by-side prints with the songs lyrics… ‘East End Boys’ on one, and ‘West End Girls’ on the other.

I quickly threw together a rough draft to show R that this was basically the greatest idea of all time. He agreed (with slightly less enthusiasm), and the next step was putting these bad boys into production.

Now, obviously if you have mad design skills (and an Adobe creative suite subscription) you could make something really freakin’ cool. But my skills are pretty mediocre, and my Adobe free trial has long expired. SO I turned to Google and set out to find some sort of website that specializes in custom poster design. After test-driving a few, I found Canva.

I wanted something simple. After a bit of tooling around, here’s what I came up with:

Now here is where it got a bit tricky: I wanted to use Ikea’s Ribba (because, cheap), which is a black frame with a white mat. The frame itself measures 19-3/4 x 27-1/2″, and with the mat, that’s reduced to 15-3/4 x 19-3/4″.

The closest standard poster size is 18 x 24″.

To make this work, I made my print 18 x 24″, but accounted for plenty of space around the edges for the mat. I didn’t attempt any sort of science / measuring nonsense, I just eye-balled it. When I was done with my design, I downloaded a hi-res version from Canva.

At this point, you can use any printing service to make your print. I chose Staples, since I’d be able to submit online and pick up same-day in store. I printed these on a standard heavyweight paper, and when I went to pick them up, the results were heavenly. So thick, so smooth. They even smelled legit.

Project time!

Since the prints were (obviously) smaller than the frame, it took a bit of adjusting to line them up just right. Once I was happy with where they were, I taped them to the back of the mat and they were good to go.

I was super happy with how these turned out, and can’t wait to try again!

Now the only question is… where do I hang them?