Walls and My Style

For the past three days I've been in a picture hanging frenzy. I just returned from a quick weekend trip to visit my family and returned (as usual) with TONS of stuff. My kind and generous family donates all sorts of great loot to the 'Keeping Claire Living in Style Organization' the KCLSO for short. Yeah, that'll catch on. On previous trips gotten a beautiful new laptop computer, an entire set of china and even bags of flour. How lucky am I? This batch of goodies had a distinctive theme: Wall Decor.

Anyone who has ever been to college or has had a similar 'first place' of an empty box with generic furniture knows the quickest way to make it your own, is to get some stuff up on the walls. In college I bought posters and tacked them up to express my personal style. Round that out with building a collage (...in college... heh) of random keepsakes made me feel downright individual. Having moved three times in the last three years my posters and keepsakes have gotten a little dog eared. Pair that with the fact that I moved to my current home while I was also technically still in school and working full time and you have a recipe for some blank walls.

Once my job ended for the season I was spending a lot more time in my apartment staring at the blank (mocking) walls. So I started looking around for a solution. I browsed the internet for fun cheap pieces of art, I searched through the targets and the wall-marts looking for some inspiration and wound up with basically nothing. All I added was what you see here, a small splatter of mirrors.

If at first you don't succeed, you ask the family for back up. Check out the awesome stuff I got!

My key chain collection, framed with love by my aunt Carol.

An awesome set of square plates from my Mom, all of which are places I've traveled to! (Framed with love by my aunt Carol. Cool new placemats are from of my aunt and uncle too.)

This awesome (and huge) piece of art that my Dad had in storage. I couldn't seem to photograph it without glare off the glass. You are just going to have to take my word for it that it is a super cool artwork.

A cool grid of album art from my friend Kris.

A closer look.

And these amazing posters! Framed with love by my aunt Carol. (Are you noticing a pattern?) Please ignore the termostat. I'm working on getting some of the wall paint from my landlord to help it blend in a little better.

Thank you all. My apartment has never felt more like a home.

My Aunt (who just happens to be a professional framer with her own shop and amazing taste) ALSO gave me three silver mirrors to spruce up my sad mirror cluster. I happily took down the round mirrors and started playing around with designs on the floor. Here's what I settled on.

When I first hung the round mirrors I arranged them on the floor too, but when I went to hang them on the wall not only did they sort of drift apart from each other, but they distinctly drifted to the left of the center of the wall. Hoping to avoid that problem with the new-and-improved version I turned magazine pages into templates for each of the mirrors. Then, using painters tape, I hung them up.

This step was vital! I re-arranged this maybe fifty times, that would have left a fair few holes if I were using the 'hang first-readjust later' approach. When I finally had it where I wanted it, I simply installed the hangers right over the paper. Once everything was hung I just tore the paper down leaving only my mirrors.

Ta DA!

What do you think? What tricks do you use when hanging art?