The Creative Imperative: stairway decor

Merry Christmas everyone! What's that you say? I'm a few days late? I know I have been MIA for a while, but I can't wait to show you all of the things I've been working on. I kind of overcommitted myself this December, but I am so happy with the way our family got through it. More on all that in future posts...

For now, I want to show you what I did yesterday at my mom and dad's house

My mom has been ~~bugging~~ asking me to help her hang pictures for over a year now. Seriously, I was happy to do it, but I knew it would take a major time commitment and some concentration to get it done.

Here is what her stairway looked like before. It's beautiful, but needed something. Ignore the Christmas garland.

I'm sure you've seen tutorials before on how to go about assembling a gallery wall. I took a few of my favorite techniques and merged them for this project.

We started gathering all her favorite frames. We decided to include both a cherry stained wood and painted black styles of frames, some with and without mats and a few mod podge photo canvases that my sister and I made my mom for Christmas. For now we weren't concerned with what was going into them, just the shape and size of each frame.

We laid everything out on the floor to get an idea of how everything would look on the wall. I took rough measurements of how tall and wide it should be and went to work.

We started with the biggest pieces, which we wanted to use as focal points, and began arranging around them. I approximated 2 inches between each frame and tried to be sure not all the frame edges matched up exactly. We didn't want it to look sloppy, but we didn't want it to look like a team of mathemeticians put this thing together either.

Next we got our tools for hanging the frames:

2" blue tape

hammer

nails

ook hooks (for frames with a wire or hook on the back)

level

picture-hanger contraption thingy

this thing was awesome and we couldn't have done the project without it. I first saw the idea at the Scrap Shoppe blog. She used a clothespin; we knew we would need something longer and flatter so we used an old piece of wood. You hang the frame from the nail on the wood, lightly tap the frame to make a small hole where your nail hole needs to be, and then take the frame away and hammer your nail into the wall.

The big frame went up first and we worked our way around it. I took the photo of all the frames laid out on the floor and used it as a basic reference. We used the blue tape as spacers between the frames. It ensured everything was approximately 2" apart.