Frame Gallery Wall: Lets Get Started!

Like most of my adventures this one started at Ikea.  Well it actually started with gathering a bunch of art and drooling researching over at Pintrest.  You can read more about that here.  But after that it totally started with a shopping trip to Ikea.  We came home with 6 big, 16 medium, and 9 small RIBBA picture frames.  31 picture frames total.....which equals one big cartful.  

 

 

There was a flash of frames and wrapping and magically everything fit nicely into its rightful place.  One good trick I learned (after getting callouses!) was that it is much easier to pry the tabs on the back of the frames up and down with a flat blade screwdriver than with your fingers.  Lesson learned RIBBA picture frames, lesson learned.

 

I planned out the picture frames to be varied with some having mats and some art taking up the whole frame.  I wanted to make the arrangement look eclectic rather than sooo uniform and perfect.





 

 I then created a boarder of the space I wanted to use with some simple ribbon on the wall.  It was waaaay easier than using painters tape and allowed me to visually see what space I wanted the arrangement to take up on the wall.

 

I created that same boarder on the floor using the ribbon.  Then I started to arrange, tweak, and arrange some more......

 

Until I had something I was pretty happy with that looked like this.  The arrangement on the floor helped to visualize what the wall arrangement would look like and left me time to tweak before it went and got all permanent with nails and all that jazz. 

 

Then I did it Martha Stewart style (like I did in this post).  By Martha Stewart style I mean cutting out rectangles to represent each picture frame and placing them on the wall as a guide for nailing up the actual pictures.  I did some tweaking on this wall as it gave me a better picture of what the arrangement would actually look like. 

 

Then I started to nail.  I put all the nails in before hanging the pictures so all the frames wouldn't shake against the wall every time I drove that nail in.  I did the nailing all myself without the help of the hubby.  Well he only helped a little.....but most of it was me!  Check back to see the full reveal!