DIY Wallpaper Photo Mats

These DIY wallpaper photo mats are a fun way to add a little pattern to your wall art and use up leftover wallpaper scraps.

I had quite a bit of leftover wallpaper after wallpapering the bedroom upstairs last year, and I’ve been trying to figure out when I do with it ever since. I absolutely love this wallpaper pattern with its subtle bunnies, butterflies, and flowers, and its soft color palette. It’s one of those patterns that looks like a simple, understated floral pattern from across the room, but when you get closer up, you realize that there’s so much more going on, and I love that. I wanted to add a bit of pattern to the desk nook in the living room, so I decided to take a little risk and try adding wallpaper to the oversized photo mats in the frames on the wall. I wasn’t 100% sure that I could pull this off successfully, but it turned out to be a really easy project, and it came together quickly, too. I always appreciate a tiny home project like this, especially one with an element of instant gratification. So here’s how to make your own DIY wallpaper photo mats.

Just a word of warning, this is a very “real life” post. I did this project on a whim one night at 10 pm, and I just grabbed some photos quickly as I went, and the photos reflect that. I still have a few updates I’d like to do to this little corner where the frames ended up, so look out for the “pretty” pictures of these finished frames hung on the wall to come soon. 🙂

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Materials Needed to Make the Wallpaper Photo Mats

You’ll need:

• Frames with photo mats to fit
• Leftover wallpaper
• A glue stick (the kind that you use for school projects
• Scissors (an exacto knife and cutting mat would work beautifully, if you have them)
• A hot glue gun and glue sticks
• A ruler or straight edge
• A pencil

The frames that I used are 16×20 with oversized mats with a space for a 4×6 photo. This makes for a very oversized mat with a lot of room to show off beautifully patterned wallpaper, but this project is still very effective if you have a photo mat with more common proportions like an 11×12 frame matted to 8×10. Even a little bit of pattern visible on a mat is still highly effective and so pretty.

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How to Add Wallpaper to Photo Mats

Start by placing your wallpaper face down on a table or another large, flat surface. Remove the mat from your frame and place it face down on the wallpaper, ensuring that the wallpaper pattern will be running in the right direction and not sideways or at a funny angle. With a pencil, carefully trace all the way around the perimeter of the photo mat and around the cutout for the photo in the middle as well. Remove the mat and set it aside.

Draw an “X” through the middle of the cut-out area for your mat using a ruler and a pencil to ensure straight lines. Cut along the lines of the X to create four triangular flaps.

Next, cut out around the exterior perimeter tracing of the photo mat. Make your cuts about 1″ outside the lines you drew to allow for a little bit of extra to fold over and hold your mats in place. Make a little cut at each corner to allow you to fold each side in when the time comes.

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Finishing Up the Wallpaper Mats

Preheat your glue gun.

Take your mat and add a little bit of glue stick to the face of it before carefully placing it down, lining it up with the original lines that you traced.

Fold the interior flaps over, as well as the exterior flaps, and glue them in place with a little bit of hot glue.

You just need enough to secure everything in place for now, but once you put your mat back in your frame, everything will be held in place, so the glue is just to keep everything smooth during assembly.

Reassemble your frame with your photo, print, or art piece of choice, the glass, and the backing piece, flip it over, and admire your work!

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Here’s where the frames are hanging in the corner of our living room, right next to my desk. You can see this corner is also currently home to a pile of guitars as well as a whole bunch of plants I’ve been propagating over the winter. Even real-life corners deserve a bit of fancy pattern every now and then. 🙂

I was so happy with how well this worked, and it has definitely got me thinking about more ways to use leftover wallpaper in future projects. If you have any smaller frames with mats, you could even use wallpaper samples to decorate your photo mats.

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