Birthday Trip Wall

As I try to get back into the groove of things with the new year, I'm anxious to work on another project.  A while back I read through the Young House Love book and jotted down all of the projects I would love to try out.  Chris already nailed #155 with the silhouette of Gypsy that he made for Christmas, so I selected #126 which is to add a surprise slice of color to a frame.  It's a quick project that involves painting the side edges of a white frame.  

I headed over to Ikea and picked up a stash of white and silver Ribba frames.  

Some of these pictures may look familiar if you were a reader back in 2011.  They are all shots from our annual birthday trips!  Our birthdays are 12 days apart, so the trip always takes place in August.  Back in 2007 Chris and I took our first trip together to San Antonio for his birthday.  In 2008 we headed to New Orleans for my birthday (although the trip was cut short by a hurricane).  We loved the tradition so much that we have continued it every year since.  2009 - Hot Springs, Arkansas.  2010 - Fredericksburg, TX.  2011 - Atlantic City, NJ and 2012 - Albuquerque, NM.  To commemorate these trips, I decided to work on a mini gallery wall for our future house (hopefully in my office).

It's harder to notice in photos than in person, but I really like the mix of silver frames with the white ones.

So back to the YHL inspired project.  I originally wanted to paint the sides of the white frames and somehow incorporate the year the trip was taken.  In my head it worked out by placing stickers down before painting the side and then removing the stickers to reveal the year in white.  While this plan sounded great in theory, once I got the frames home and laid them out I recognized that the painted sides wouldn't have the same effect as part of a group as it would on an individual frame. 

Although the original plan to paint the sides probably isn't going to work for this (but I plan to try it with another project), I would still like to incorporate the year of each trip in some way.  I'm tossed between painting the mat and leaving white numbers for the year, or just writing (or using scrapbook stickers) the year on the bottom middle of the mat.  It's harder to imagine with just words, so I might have to just test out both ideas in reality.  If I don't like either I know that photo mats are very easy to replace.

What would you do?  Would you paint the mat and have white numbers for the year, or just write the number on the bottom middle of the mat (or use nice script stickers)?  Or would you just leave it as is and hope that your memory will stick with you through the years?