Picture Wall

Since we live in a tiny apartment, all of my craft stuff lives in boxes in the office closet.  I'm normally not all that into background noise, but I like to have either a show or movie on when I am creating.  We only have one TV, which is in the living room, which means when I want to get crafty I have to drag everything out of the office and into the living room.  This tends to make a HUGE mess so I don't do it unless I have a few hours to work.  I got everything out Wednesday night but was in a little bit of a creative funk, so I didn't get much done other to realize that I have a ton of crap that I need to make things with.  I also have approximately 12 gazillion photographs that need to be scrapbooked.  It was a little overwhelming.  So my new plan is to use what I have before I go shopping for any new projects.  I did make a few things, and realized that there are some projects I hadn't yet taken pictures of, but of course all of those pictures are on my camera which is at home while I am stuck at school all afternoon then have to rush home to change for a wedding.  So hopefully next week I will have all kinds of stuff to share.

Anyway, this is more of a decorating than a craft post, but I thought I would share anyway.  I love to decorate with photographs, probably way too much.  :)  I like artwork well enough, but I would rather be surrounded by memories and the people I love.  If my apartment were ever to burn down and I could only grab one thing, it would be my drawer of photo backup cds. 

I was lucky enough to spend my junior year of college studying abroad in Cambridge, England.  Even now, three years later, a day rarely goes by where I don't miss it.  Our school year consisted of three eight week terms with six week breaks in between.  So we had 12 weeks where our options were to fly home to the US, stay in the dorm (we had to pay for each night we stayed though) or travel.  My obvious choice was to backpack around Europe and it was so awesome.  I have tons of pictures from that time--after our trips, the friends that I traveled with would share our pictures, so I have everything I took plus everything they took.  I really wanted a way to display at least some of them.  Last year, Target sold a set of frames that had some 8x10s, some 5x7s and some 4x6s.  I bought one box on clearance and kicked myself for not getting two.  I got another set from Walmart on line.  They don't match exactly, but they are both black--actually the Walmart ones are nicer and I think they were the same price.

I added ribbon to hang them from to add some visual interest and to take up more space because I had a big wall I wanted to fill.  I would suggest laying them out ahead of time on the floor so you can get the configuration you want.  I had originally hot glued the ribbon but some of them kept falling so I stapled them instead (I just used my regular stapler, but a staple gun would probably be easier).  The hardest part was deciding what pictures to use.  I love the way it looks and every day I am reminded of how much fun we had on our trips!