My father-in-law has been collecting pallets for years and stockpiling the planks in order to realise his dream of building a couple of small cottages on a piece of land northeast of Québec City. On an autumn visit to his land, I was amazed by the vast diversity of mushrooms which were present across the property. When he saw me photographing the dozens of different fungi, his initial response was, "Why are you interested in those? They're all the same!"
For his Christmas present, my partner suggested I build him a frame to showcase some of the fabulous mycodiversity from his land... of course using reclaimed pallet wood.
I really enjoyed the multi-disciplinary nature of this project, since I got to spend a fair amount of time working with my photography before even moving on to the carpentry stage. After narrowing the selection of species down to eight (I photographed over 20 unique species on that one visit!), doing some basic photo editing, and having them all printed, I got to the framing. The final product now hangs prominently on the wall of the main cottage of the property.
Detail shot of the pallet-wood frame. The central photo shows my father-in-law's by his first cottage built primarily of repurposed pallet wood.
Finished shot of the full frame, built around nine basic glass frames. The wood is from a few planks of reclaimed pallet wood, with no visible hardware.
The first step was to choose an array of photos. I narrowed my selection of fungi shots down to eight very different specimens from around my father-in-law's land, and then arranged them in a layout which I found worked well. He built several cabins on that property, all using reclaimed pallet wood as the main building material. I printed the central photo in 8"x10", four mushroom photos in 4"x6", and the other four in 3"x5".
Starting with a couple of pallet planks which I split down the centre to get a good width, I framed each of the glass frames in order from the centre outwards until I had 20 lengths which formed a great set of frames.
The next challenge was to connect all the frame segments solidly from behind. To maintain the piece's integrity as being built entirely of reclaimed pallet wood, I used a selection of lengths of the leftover planks, depending on how many frame segments were to be connected by each. The goal was also to provide backers for all four corners of each glass frame.
Once I had all of the frame segments and connectors laid out, I needed to screw them all together so everything would hold solidly. Since the pieces were small and dense, I actually had to drill pilot holes (yellow drill) before driving the screws in (cordless drill). I used a tub of drywall screws I'd recently harvested from my closet renovation work. This time-lapse shows (there's no sound) the assembly process in fast-motion, which actually took just over an hour.
The final pallet-wood frame, showing the mushroom photos surrounding the cottage photo.
The frame in its final home: on the living room wall of my father-in-law's main pallet-wood cottage.
