Our personal gallery wall.

You may have already noticed my secret project on the House tab of this blog or in the recent living room posts. Well, it hasn’t been intentionally secret, obviously, but I wanted to post about it once I received my photograph prints & the day has finally come! {Get pumped.}

You can easily find a zillion gallery walls around blogland, and I’m usually not one to go with a big trend, but because I have a love of photography & personalizing my home, I set out to create my own gallery wall. I purchased a handful of Ribba frames from Ikea a while back, and I’ve been snagging some plane black frames from the Dollar Tree every week or so. I didn’t want a perfectly aligned gallery wall, nor do I have the patience to measure it all to the centimeter, so I traced templates of my frames on some ads & taped ‘em to the wall space above my $10 Craigslist dresser, right in the entrance of our house.

Once I had the ad templates, I could easily adjust the arrangement & I even measured on the paper where to place my screw or nail, making it a tad easier to hang the frames. See the nail next to the deli tray, right above the 99 cents hotdogs? ;)

I started out with just 12 frames, but once I had them in place, Eugene & I both agreed it seemed a little sparse.

So I headed back to the Dollar Tree for more frames to bulk up the gallery wall…

 
{Sorry for the bad pics above…I tackle most of my projects late at night after work, so it’s always too dark for good pics.}

I’m still short two prints, but I found most of the prints waiting for me in the mail yesterday from www.artscow.com. 

So allow me to introduce you to the the current “after” shots of our personalized gallery wall…

Each piece has special meaning, making it extra special for all who enter our house to be greeted with stories of our life hanging on the wall. The far left photo is one I took of the sun setting on some blue berries at the condo we lived at before we moved to our house. I met a man, whom I’d never seen before that spoke to me about the best spot to see the sunset behind the condos. He spoke of God’s beautiful creation, and it was yet another one of those rare, rare instances where I felt maybe I was speaking to someone more than a stranger. {Go ahead & call me crazy ;) I’m okay with that.} Of course to the right of the blue berry photo is Espn’s schnoz – one of my favorite pics I’ve taken. Below Espn is a pretty pic of bright orange fall leaves. Again, this was at our condo & I love bright Fall leaves because they remind me of volleyball season.

For the center photo, I cropped a picture our our wedding photographer, Erika Rice, took of us standing in the wheat field on our wedding day. That wheat symbolizes such a huge amount of answered prayers & God working in a big way through the tiny, seemingly unimportant details of my life. It reminds me of God’s physical blessing for the start of our marriage. I  have three other pics from our wedding day also thrown in…I just love our pictures from that day. Not to mention our bridal party was our best friends & family – they totally deserve a spot on the gallery wall!

The sunset above the wheat photo is from the most romantic dinner Eugene & I will ever have, hands down. It reminds me of our unreal honeymoon & the beautiful memories I have of the Dominican Republic.  The pic of Eugene & me below the wheat is from one of my teammate’s wedding receptions; I love how happy we look.

Baby Cate’s {my niece}  beautiful profile graces our wall too, along with the recent pic I took of tulips & rain on my birthday. And there’s also three pieces that I made. First is a cross-stitched pillow case my Aunt Bobbie gave me when I was younger to add to my hope chest {along with this vintage tin bowl.} I managed to fold the pillowcase small enough to fit into the frame & taped it in on the back, since the back of the frame wouldn’t fit back on. Slightly make-shift, but it works & I love the vintage feel & happy colors in the embroidery.

For the amperstand art below, I just used some pretty scrapbook paper as the background, printed the “&” on my computer, cut it carefully, and taped it to the scrapbook paper. Easy peasy!

I also made & printed a winter photo I took, in combination with Psalm 83:4, the verse that helped me so much through our house search…

And finally, I’ve noticed some typography art around the blogosphere. I liked Young House Love’s magazine monogram, but I wanted something more personal. So, using publisher, I made my own monogram art. “S’ for our last name, but it also goes on to start with Saturday, June 20, 2009 {the date of our wedding} and continues with the text of the vows we wrote together. Many promises made on that day, and I want to keep them near our lives – out in the open, where we can glance at them any time of the day – to remind us to hold true to our commitment, to our friendship. I love our vows, and I love having them on my wall {so much.}

So there ya have it, in a not-so-concise, super long blog post! Obviously the gallery wall is pretty darn meaningful to us. I love that it reflects our lives, and I love that I can continue to add to it, or swap out photos as our lives grow and change.

     

I know I like the end result, but I’m not sure how it looks to people who don’t relate to the pictures like I do. Hopefully our guests will enjoy looking at the wall as much as I do. :)

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