One of my goals for the year is to get more of my images off the computer and into our house. One of the challenges is there can only be so many big framed photographs on our walls and I tend to save those spots for my very favorite images. If you take a look at my files, you would see that we take literally thousands of photos every year documenting our life together. I wanted a way to create a temporary image gallery that we can rotate with different images throughout the year.
Having a gallery wall covered in frames is quite popular these days with the decor bloggers. It gives an eclectic but finished feel to your lifestyle photos and snapshots. I think they are beautiful but we don’t really have a space in our house that would facilitate a wall like this without adding a visually cluttered feeling. Plus, if I am being completely honest, my personality does not lend itself to my having to open each and every frame to swap out photos. I would want to, I would put it in my todo list but just don’t think it would actually get done very often.
I needed to find something simpler. Nothing gets much simpler than this idea. The owners of this home grabbed some colorful tape and just taped their images onto the wall. This has a lighthearted, bohemian feel that can be very sweet. In fact, I totally did this in my teens and early twenties. But I guess I’m just not quite that bohemian anymore. Nowadays, I want my photographic displays to have little more feeling of polish and intention. Plus, I would worry about the tape peeling off paint, etc when it came time to remove them.
I love this idea of putting a bunch of meaningful images together into one big matted frame. Sadly, this still would not work for my rotating gallery. It’s more of a set it and forget it type of thing with an occasional refresh. I cant see myself taking down the frame and resetting new photos into the photo mat every month or so.
Maybe this would be the perfect solution. A frame with wire and clothespins. I love this idea. It incorporates the ideas of framing a large grouping into one element like the idea above, but it allows for easy swapping in and out of photographs. Somthing like this may well be in my future. I’ll have to see if I can convince my handy husband to make something similar for our house. I love the idea but it might take a bit of time to execute.
In the mean time, I took a little inspiration from the pennant and bunting trend to make a photo bunting. This was a super easy and quick project to implement. Using materials we had on hand, I grabbed a length of pretty ribbon, two thumbtacks, silver hair clips (I would suggest trying paperclips but we didn’t have any around the house), and some favorite photographs from our Holiday Photo project.
This is what our mantle looked like over the holidays. The images tell the story of the day we went in search of our perfect christmas tree, interspersed with images from out Holiday Photo Inspiration to Reality project. We got a ton of compliments from our friends and family who really enjoyed seeing the memories we chose to display. Even more importantly, it made me smile every time I sat down in the livingroom.
Here is a closeup. I first tried using clothespins but they ended up seeming too heavy, both visually and the physical weight. I rummaged through my craft supplies and found these basic silver hair clips. I just clipped the photographs to the ribbon. The whole project took less than 15 minutes. Now that it’s set up, switching out photos takes a few minutes at most.
