Holiday Presents under a dollar? Yes please!

This week I started on the "aunt and uncle" presents from Little guy- we never do this, but honestly, I wanted to try out my new home made modge podge- and I had some extra paint and wooden plaques left. I would be more excited if All my plaques were a decent size, but they seemed too small or big. In the end I chose the smaller ones and cut the pictures-


These came out to be around .50 a piece and here is how it breaks down:

Home made modge podge - 1.00 for the total bottle. I made 12 of these and used UNDER a quarter of the bottle. So about .02 each in modge podge
Plaque - Usually .59 but I always use coupons - so mine was.30
Pictures- I ordered a bunch at around .08 each with a 40% off coupon from walgreens.com last week
Paint- I always get the .59 cent bottles from Joanns and use coupons- so around .30 for the whole bottle. I got around 8 out of each bottle - making it around .05 each in paint, 

 Adding the metal piece for hanging would actually be around another .10 for me (package of 10 at dollar tree) but I think normally they are around 4 for 1.00 - I didnt add anything to mine, so that is out of the budget.

So yah.. Heres how it works. Its super simple and I made a bunch for my hallway this weekend too (I had alot of fun finding pictures, adding words etc)

1.Paint everything but the face of the plaque - its not that you can not paint the front- it just saves paint. (back is optional, I didnt because Im going to add year and his name)
2.Let dry - You may need a second and third coat depending. I only needed 1 coat with the black and pink- i used acrylic paint.
3. Once dry add modge podge to your picture back and the face of the plaque. - dont add too much or you will have a globby mess
4.Place picture on the plaque face- Let dry around 10 minutes
5.  Then take modge podge, apply coat to top of picture and onto the sides too. Since I was using Matte- I didnt really add to the whole plaque, but if using glossy, go ahead and do that so everything matches.
6. Let dry- when it does. You may add second coat if you want. I did.

Please note:
YOUR PICTURE WILL LOOK SMEARED AND YUCKY UNDER THE WHITE OF THE MODGE PODGE. Dont worry- it will be okay. I use a foam brush to do basically everything, and this is no exception.

Enjoy this project- I got the words on it by adding them in powerpoint or any other picture editor- then saving as PDF and sending to walgreens to be printed- it prints right with the words...