Crazy as it is, Halloween is Jay and my 3rd anniversary. Its fun because it feels a little bit like everyone is celebrating with us! I've been dying to frame up some of the great pictures we've taken on our travels together to celebrate how fun we are. Unfortunately Jay threw down a "no more things hanging on the walls" clause for our home as he was starting to feel overwhelmed by the amount of art. If it were up to me pretty much every wall surface would be covered in some sort of framed item but he's a clean lines no clutter sort of guy (this is in theory only, his items explode all over the house in reality).
After a few weeks of strategically placed pictures of gallery walls he started to warm up to the idea. He thought he liked ones with white frames, but I have a pathologic need to put every single thing in a black frame with a white mat. Everything. This is partially because it's awesome that you can hang any picture in any room and it will always go together and partially because I had an art teacher who told me that's how professionals display their work in a gallery setting when I was an impressionable college student. Luckily he was easily convinced that black and white was the way to go. Maybe white would have been cool, we'll never know.
Once I got the go ahead for the wall I gathered the extra frames I had around and brainstormed locations. I thought about putting it in our bedroom, but the lighting in there is terrible and we wouldn't get to enjoy it as much as in a more prominent location. Eventually the dining room wall with the arch revealed itself as the perfect location.
After Jay ran to Ikea to grab a few more frames we got to work figuring out how to hang them all together in a cool, eclectic and not visually assaulting manner.
After a few weeks of strategically placed pictures of gallery walls he started to warm up to the idea. He thought he liked ones with white frames, but I have a pathologic need to put every single thing in a black frame with a white mat. Everything. This is partially because it's awesome that you can hang any picture in any room and it will always go together and partially because I had an art teacher who told me that's how professionals display their work in a gallery setting when I was an impressionable college student. Luckily he was easily convinced that black and white was the way to go. Maybe white would have been cool, we'll never know.
Once I got the go ahead for the wall I gathered the extra frames I had around and brainstormed locations. I thought about putting it in our bedroom, but the lighting in there is terrible and we wouldn't get to enjoy it as much as in a more prominent location. Eventually the dining room wall with the arch revealed itself as the perfect location.
After Jay ran to Ikea to grab a few more frames we got to work figuring out how to hang them all together in a cool, eclectic and not visually assaulting manner.
First we laid the pictures out on the floor and moved them around until we found a pattern we liked. Then we used some packing paper we had from a recently arrived shipment of dog food to cut out a pattern of each frame to try the arrangement on the wall. This eclectic design of frames instead of neat even rows was a big step for Mr. Jay the engineer-minded pilot person. Snaps for Jay.
Super easy, we just traced the frames with a pencil, cut them out and stuck them up on the wall with masking tape.
As you can see what we ended up with is exactly nothing like what we really liked on our original floor layout. We decided our first plan was fighting with the arched architecture of the house and rearranged our pictures to flow with the curve instead. Above you can see the biggest frame is already stuck to the wall, we used command picture hanging strips so the landlords don't have a cow and so we can make sure everything is straight. We wanted to use that big picture as a visual anchor and then built the rest of the design around it. This process was much more stressful than it should have been, but we were simultaneously watching Missouri fail to win their homecoming game against South Carolina and ruin their perfect season.
Yay! Here it is all finished. We ordered our prints from MPix who do such a nice job for a great price. Our whole order was only around $20 and you can see we got a few large ones. The big picture at the bottom is from when we climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania two summers ago. That was definitely the craziest adventure we've been on yet! We also framed a few of our pics from our trip to California this past summer, Puerto Rico and Miami when we first started dating and of course some climbing pictures and some shots of Butters! The blank frame at the bottom is probably going to have a little map of our travels in it, but maybe something else? I can't decide!
I love the shape of the frames and how its only a small area instead of an overwhelmingly huge space. This project definitely took us longer than expected to get everything to look balanced and artfully placed instead of ridiculous or formulaic. Makes me smile every time I walk in the room and I hope you all enjoy it too! Oh and because of the holiday, obligatory pumpkin pic!