Photo Frame Collage Project

I've seen these photo wall collages for years and have always thought they are a clever way of clustering neat visual elements.

Many moons ago, when I was still rocking a 35mm camera, I tended to have a ton of physical photos kicking around. After a lot of years of collecting frames for all my photos, I had ended up with a pretty decent stockpile of neat frames.  So I had an idea of creating a cool wall collage with the nicest of the ones I had collected.

The only problem: they were all different colors that didn't really go well together. Solution: painting time!!

Conveniently, I had some paint left over from the table refurbish project, so I simply used that to repaint the frames I had.

Once I had the frames finished, I arranged them in about a dozen ways to try to figure out what worked with what I had and came up with this layout.

Once I had the frame configuration figured out, it took me a while to decide what I wanted to do with what would go inside them. Finally, I decided to fill each frame with pieces of cloth from my quilt project.

Then began the task of getting this bad boy up on the wall. I didn't take photos of how I did this part (mostly because there was a giant mess during the process and I like pretending like all my projects are well organized and always super clean haha).

Here's how I suggest doing this:

1. Make a layout plan on the floor or a large table (mind spacing and sizes and designs as much as possible)
2. Turn over each frame and place a strip of parchment paper or news papers over the backs of the frames. 
3. Feeling through the paper, mark where each frame will be hung. 
4. Using a laser level, make sure the markers are level and tape your paper to the wall where the frames will go.
5. Drill small holes through the paper into your wall to prepare for slightly larger nails (if you have heavy frames, you may want to use screws instead of nails)
6. Hammer in your nails and pull off the paper from the wall
7. Hang your frames

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Protip: when drilling holes in walls (especially if you have plaster walls like I do), to avoid the mess, stick folded post-it notes to the wall under the place where you're going to drill your hole so that it catches all the wall mess. I learned this trick a few years ago and have been using it ever since!

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Here's how mine turned out!