I mentioned in a post I previously wrote that I tend to have hard time figuring out how to decorate large wall spaces in my home. My last post was a DIY post on how to create large decorative fabric boards. One of my other go-to secrets? Wall collages.
I use these everywhere in my house. I love framed black and white photography, so that makes it easy to do. Of course, I have a huge collage of framed black and white wedding pictures that takes up a large wall in my dining/living area.
I probably invested the most time and money into creating this particular collage, since it is intended to highlight our wedding day. I ordered all of the photos through my wedding photographer. However, most wedding photographers give you the rights to reprint the images wherever you’d like. My go-to photo printing place is Mpix. Mpix allows you to upload whatever photos you want printed into separate albums (similar to Waglreen’s), and select what you would like to have printed. They have a huge range of sizes, and the photo quality is really great. This is what I use to print off all of the other pictures in my house.
The frames pictured here are from Pottery Barn, and again, were a bit more of an investment. I was very specific about how I wanted these photos laid out, so I was very selective about which size and shape frames I purchased. If you look closely, the smaller pictures on the outer edges of the collage sort of mirror each other. For example, one side features the bride more, while the other features the groom, then I put photos of us together in the center. I will say, hanging these and figuring out the spacing on them was a challenge, due to the fact that all of the frames are different shapes and sizes. Lucky for me, my husband is a very patient man, and spent a long time getting this hung just right for me!
The next photo collage I have in my home is a little more affordable, because you build on it over time. Every time we have some sort of life event (think maternity pictures, newborn pictures, Christmas pictures, 1st birthdays, etc.), I try to hire a professional photographer to do a quick little shoot so I can have those pictures added to an ever-growing wall collage in my hallway. Of course, a lot of people are much better with a camera than I am, and can take their own photos, have them printed in black and white, and achieve this same look while saving a few bucks! Our house is set up so that off of the living area, there is one long hallway where all of the bedrooms are off of. I hate not having anything on those walls so I thought this was the perfect place to start this collage. As of right now, it features pictures from our maternity shoot with my daughter (we will have another maternity shoot coming up in September!), her newborn photography session, as well as a few pictures from a family session we did for our Christmas cards last year. I also hired a photographer to shoot my daughter’s first birthday party, so I have those pictures to add as well, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. This is probably my favorite collage in my home because it sort of feels like a timeline of our family, and it is so fun to walk down the hall and look at the progression of pictures.
All of the frames for this collage were purchased from West Elm. I chose these because they are square with a 5×7 photo size. The fact that they are square makes it easy to select the photos you want, without having to worry about the orientation (portrait or landscape) of the photo. If you notice, all of the frames line up perfectly because they are exactly the same, but I am able to choose whichever photos I want regardless of orientation because I can just turn each frame as needed to accommodate the photos.
I have different types of wall collages all over my house. These are just the ones I have done of photos. Stay tuned for the second part of this post, which will feature a couple of other ways to decorate large walls using different types of collages!
xo, Loren
