Trash to Treasure Project: Repurposed Frame to Key Display

For years I’ve held onto keys, tags and locks from my grandparents and parents not wanting to throw them away, but also not knowing what to do with them. Now they are displayed in a repurposed picture frame.

The old picture frame had no glass, so I stapled square wire to the back of it and then sprayed the whole thing red.

I made a heart-shaped paper pattern and placed it under the wire so I’d know where to connect the keys to the wire with pieces of small gauge wire.

Some keys were fragile so I glued them onto a frame. Using the same paper stencil, my husband cut a heart out of Luanne wood for me. After painting it red and drilling two small holes in the wooden heart, I attached it to the wire.

The old items on the frame include a solid brass lock and key from WWII, a key stamped “Made in England”, and small keys from various clocks, desks, and box safes most from the 1900s.

There are also two bank tags from the Security Trust & Savings Bank, in Los Angeles that were employee key tags of my dad’s. An interesting side note, while working at the bank, two casting directors from Paramount Studios came in and took a photo of my dad. A few days later they came back and offered him a job as a double for Cary Grant in a movie that was being filmed. He turned them down and the rest is history! Here’s that picture they took of my dad: