Arranging our art wall, step by step.

Whew! This post has been awhile in the making. I'm learning that it's all about patience when it comes to frugal home decor. Well, two years ago (I told you it's been awhile!) I got married. Our anniversary is on the 15th! Aaaaand about a month-and-a-half ago, we got this in the mail: Its our wedding pictures! I picked out some pictures that I wanted to put in a collage on our bedroom wall. So I gathered up all the frames we received as wedding gifts. I noticed that most of them were a brushed or antiqued silver color. Except for this one:

I researched whether you could antique something like that and I found a website that described how you can get that effect on your silver dishes with one of these:



The frame said it was silver plated, so I thought what the heck? I mashed it up in a bag, so it looked like this:

I rubbed the egg all over the frame and guess what? Epic fail. All it accomplished is making me feel silly and making me crave egg salad. So eventually, I decided that frame would be best used for another project. :0)

But I had this frame already. And I thought to myself, "how on earth am I going to find pictures that small from our wedding?" And then I dug deep and realized that I could take the matting out and use a big picture!
I heard from Layla that you should lay out the pictures on the floor in front of the wall that you want to hang them on in order to figure out how to arrange them. Buuuut, we don't have floor space, so I used our bed. First, I tried an arrangement where all the pictures are arranged with a horizontal line inbetween. I think I saw it on Martha's website. It's kind of meh, for me.
Then I tried something a little more stair-steppy.
Then I tried putting the biggest frame in the middle (which I think I heard from the Nester) and flanking it with smaller ones. But there are a lot of larger frames in my collection....
Then I tried throwing out all the rules.
I added the new oval frame in. I tried to balance the black and whites with the colors and made sure the matching frames weren't next to each other.
Then I went for more of a "diamond" shape. Roughly. Which I think I saw on Layla's Houzz interview.
And that ended up to be the one I liked the best! Another trick I heard from Martha is that you should use newspaper templates to hang up on your wall before you put the frames up. It makes it easy to get the nails (or whatever you use) in the right spot.
I love having that be our art in our bedroom. It reminds us of that special day and helps me to drop my other concerns at the door. Our bedroom came together in a lot of soothing tones and this really highlights them for me.
Yay! It's finally done! *runs to find a checklist to cross it off of*