Agate Slice Art

I've always loved rocks and gems. I can remember hanging out at the rotating racks of rocks at the local bookstore my Grandma use to take my sister and I too. The pyrite (fool's gold) and amethyst geodes (I'm a February baby) were a couple of my favorites.

Then there is also the fact that my name is Crystal (gem sounding right?), we named our daughter Ruby (a beautiful red gem but not intentionally going for a theme there) and I love the idea of having a little Pearl running around the house someday (although that would unintentionally be taking a themed name thing too far...probably....we'll see...). 

And then there is this gorgeous malachite with an inlay design on the lid that I picked up at a thrift store. Seriously love the deep, emeraldy greens of it. (You might have seen this on my instragram, but if not, go here to follow me!)

Anyway, I love rocks. So when my blog friend Caitlin, who goes to an annual gem fair in Arizona, offered to hook people up with discounted agate slices or bookends or whatever they wanted, I took her up on her offer. She's DIY'd some agate slices into beautiful gold leaf coasters - check them out here.

She got me these (I paid her for them of course) and I finally got around to doing something with them today!

But before I show you what I did, here's a couple awesome photos of agate slices that I found. Seriously I want these agate slice stained glass windows by Sigmar Polke in my house. 

{photo from a press kit released by Grossmunster via}

{via}

It would be lovely to have my agate slices out loose decoration but after bringing them home and Ruby wanting to play with them (she's three) and Archer trying to chew on them (he's eighteen months), I knew they needed to be somewhere high and safe. So I decided to frame them. Here's what I needed to get started.

The first thing I needed to do was make a white background for the agate slices so I used the backside of some heavy scrapbook paper (with a baby theme that I don't think I'll end up using since I've given up on scrapbooking), cutting it to fit behind the mat. 

 I flipped the mat over and taped the scrapbook paper on (somehow I forgot to get a picture of the backside with the baby theme scrapbook paper - I picked my least favorite designs so you're not missing much.)

Next up was to attach the agate slices. I had picked up some transparent velcro from Home Depot a couple of weeks ago but at Aaron's suggestion, I decided to just use some packaging tape. The slices are pretty thick and the velcro would have just added to that thickness, most likely making it impossible to get it all to fit in the frame.

 Everything is squeezed into the frame pretty tight so I'm not really worried about the tape not working, especially since I tested the agate slices in the frame without tape and they didn't move then.

It didn't take long get them taped and laid out. Oh and you might have noticed that I got two frames. This set of three is for Ruby's room (it is a happy accident that the purple, fuschia and teal match her new pom pom trimmed curtain) and the other three are for Archer's room (you'll see it more at the end).

Then I cleaned the glass and put the frame back together and one was done! It was a tight squeeze for sure but the frame is held together with little prongs so they can adjust to new depths if you add more to the frame.

We haven't hung it up yet so I'm not completely decided on whether it will go vertical or horizontal but I'm pretty sure I like horizontal better.  

After I finished up on Ruby's, I moved onto Archer's. For Archer, I decided to get the brown, wood-grained frame which will match some of the brown frames already in his room and go well with the other color in his room. 

 The blues, browns and creamy gold colors will go great with the new roman shade in his room (another happy accident!) which is full of reds, greens, browns, blues and creamy colors.

Here they are together - brother and sister agate slice frames. Awwww.

And just in case you're wondering if the packaging tape will stand up to gravity at all, it does. At least long enough for me to take this picture. ;) As soon as I figure out where they're going, we'll get them hung up and I'll let you know if the tape worked or not.

So how was your weekend? Did some of you ladies make it to Ikea after all? We didn't really have a chance on Saturday (we went to the Aquarium with the kids and had to come home for a nap) during the day to go so I snuck off after the kids went to bed that night - got there 15 minutes before they closed and then waited in line for 20 minutes to check out. Nice. Setting that bit of line irritation aside, it was a great weekend.

♥Crystal

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