Frames: Before and After

As part of my gallery wall, I bought a frame and a mirror at the Salvation Army. The frame was for a picture that was previously in a silver frame, which didn't fit with my plan.
Here is the frame before, with the beautiful artwork that it came with:

And since I was so enjoying painting outside on the balcony, I forgot to take a true before picture of the mirror. So here's a "just after I started painting" picture:

The gold frame took several coats and sanding between coats to make it look the way I wanted. The mirror was much easier.

The gold frame is in the middle in the picture below. I put a picture of my dad and his wife, my sister and I from my dads wedding last summer.

And the mirror:

It's really hard to get a good picture of a mirror!

This just shows how easy it is to take cheap frames from thrift stores and make them into something you'd be proud to display!

Gallery Wall: Part 2

I decided to take a rather scientific approach to this wall, and did some research (because thats what I'm good at). In my last post I showed some inspiration pictures that I found during my research. 

The first thing I did was gather all of the items that could potentially go on the wall- pictures, mirrors, candle holders, etc. I had a few things that needed some changes- a frame I already owned that needed to be painted, a picture in a silver frame that I wanted to  reframe, and some empty space I needed to fill. 

I started by painting the frame I already owned with my black latex glossy paint. I actually found this frame in the alley behind my apartment in Chicago, two years ago. I really liked it although I had no idea what I would do with it. I contemplated many different things- adding some screening to make it an earring holder, adding a mirror, framing my diploma (it was too small...) and ultimately just hanging it empty. The picture below is the best picture I have, I think. You can see, I am preparing to paint on my balcony! Painting outside is really nice.

This frame really did not want to be painted. Even with sanding and cleaning it off, the first coat of paint wasn't sticking well. So, I re-sanded (lightly) and did another coat, and then repeated the process again. In retrospect, I probably would have done better to use some sort of primer, but it was already too late when I decided that was the case.

Once I had that frame painted, I started putting together the layout. First I needed to decide where to start on this monster wall- in the center, or on the side. Pardon the horrible cell phone picture, but it didn't occur to me to take a picture of this with my camera.

The horrible cell phone picture helped me decide that I should start on the side, so I laid out all of my items on the floor in the arrangement I wanted on the wall.  I won't lie- I left it like this on the floor for a couple days, stepping over it many times a day to decide if I liked it.

Once I was satisfied, I used blue painters tape to put the entire arrangement on the wall. Again, I left it for a while to make sure I liked it. 

Once I decided it was what I wanted, I actually started putting nails in the wall to hang things.

OK, OK, enough. Here's the final result:

More about the mirror and picture frame I added later.

The Livingroom: Gallery Wall

A daunting task in the decorating of my new apartment is the walls in the living room. Two of the three walls are very large, and uninterrupted. They come to a point in the center, which is 10 feet tall, the other sides are the normal 8 feet.

One of the two monstrous walls

What to do with this? I feared that any of the wall decorations I currently own would be dwarfed by the wall and just look ridiculous. So I needed to think of something else. Looking at how I'd arranged my plate collection on the wall at my old apartment (and possibly my new?? stay tuned) I decided that I should do a gallery style wall. What is a gallery style wall? Well, a wall with a lot of pictures or other items hung in a seemingly random way. Here are some pictures I have collected of particularly awesome gallery walls. (All taken from Design*Sponge.

I love how they all have a connecting theme, but each has its own feel. One has all black frames with black and white photography and art, another is silhouette themed, and the last one pictured is all artwork created by the owner's friends. Given what I own already or could easily modify, I decided that I would use all of my photos framed in black, my newly framed master's diploma, and scatter in some other things-- a mirror, an empty frame, a floating shelf with a painting, and the two sconces I had in my living room at the other apartment. 

Want to see how I went about designing and implementing the wall? Well stay tuned for my next post where I will explain the rest of the process.