Picture Walls!

Over the weekend, I helped Noe create her own picture wall since I am a professional and had already made one in my abode.  And she just seemed awed at the sheer amount of information I had stored in my little brain, so I thought I would share my tips and tricks to making a picture wall. 

First of all, you need a plan.  I had a handful of pictures I already knew I wanted to use, but I knew they were not enough to cover the wall I wanted to do.  Which is the hallway by the way.  What else can you do in a hallway??  Nothing.  Since I didn't have enough images to fill the wall, I bought more frames than I needed at the moment.  And I knew I wanted to have all of my images contain people, my friends and family.  And I wanted to use pictures from my current life as well as childhood and family pictures from when Stud and I were babies, before we met.  We met in first grade by the way.  He was a dork, I was cool, so needless to say, we didn't hit it off until MUCH later.  Through my picture hunting, I even managed to dig up some wedding pictures from when my grandparents got married.  To tie everything together, I decided to do all black frames.  I was going to do all black and white images, but some of them were just too good in color, so I dropped that idea.  To summarize the plan - black frames of varying shapes and sizes with people filled pictures. 

Then I went skipping across the city looking for frames.  Michael's and TJ Maxx are great places to look for cheap frames.  With Noe, I also went to Big Lots and they had some good ones as well.  I made sure to get some plain frames, and then some that had texture and varying widths of the frame.  Most of the textured ones were not black, so I got some high gloss black spray paint and painted all the ones that didn't match.  Also, the frames that have several images to one have a bit of a theme.  The long one in the middle has images from Carolina Cup my senior year of college and is probably one of my favorite frames on the wall.  So amazing.  And the one on the end has pictures from Europe.

And now the fun part.  I took a large roll of wrapping paper and unrolled it along the wall and cut it at the length I wanted to use for the picture wall.  I then laid the paper down and planned all the frames out on the paper.  Once I had my plan, I traced the frames and added little marks where I needed to put the picture hooks.  When I taped the paper back up on the wall, all I had to do was put the hooks in the marks, tear the paper down, and hang the frames!  Made it so easy.  I actually filled the last few frames just last weekend and I still have two empty ones that I plan to use for wedding pics after October.  It's harder than you think to find the right mix of sizes, orientation and general fit on the wall.  I left several blank just waiting for the right pictures and I am slowly finding them.  That one in the middle from Red River Gorge is just from the other weekend.  And it got Beau Fluff on the wall.  And there are still some I might change, I like that I can keep it a changing piece of art in my house.