Friday, January 14, 2011

Wall of Frames

I'm not a good decorator.  Never have been. I did not inherit the Martha Stewart gene. Most of the walls in this big house we're in are still bare except for my office. And, I'm okay with that. I like to think that I have the Scandinavian Look going on although I've never studied just exactly what that would look like. I like simple. I don't like knick-knack paddy whacks. But I do love photos, old and new.

I came up with this idea last year to buy a wagon load of the same sized plastic "Chinese-crap" photo frames and start hanging them on the wall in my office. Every time I visit Craft Warehouse, I buy a little stack of them and as I'm going through my photos and see one that I'd like to hang, up on the wall it goes. There's no organization to this other than the frames are all exactly the same kind. As you can see, I'm not finished with my Wall of Fame but it's a start. I'd love to tell you which is my favorite photo but I wouldn't be able to choose. They're all my favorites. I'm very connected with the pictures I shoot. They are kind of like old songs ~ you can remember exactly how you felt the first time you heard a certain song ~ that's what it's like for me when I look at my photos. 

It was a really big deal for me to decide to puncture holes in the wall. Pounding a hole in the wall is a commitment. At first, I had purchased some of those 3M velcro backings to stick them up with but they kept falling off. One day Gene said, "why don't you just put nails in the wall?"  I guess I was thinking it would be a pain to cover up the holes when we get ready to  sell this house some day but he assured me it would be okay and he'd be able to cover them up easily.

With the invent of digital photography, I have to stay mindful of getting my favorite photos printed every so often. I also recently bought a 16gb stick to back-up my photos to.  This is a 3-day weekend so perhaps I'll find some time to finish hanging up some frames to fill in this side of the wall and maybe get some photos printed and definitely get them backed up to that new stick. My computer has been running extremely slow this week and I have this sinking feeling one day I'm going to wake up to a dead box. It would be a sad day to lose all my photos.

This wall in my ironing room is kind of a mess I think. I've had these framed photos laying around in boxes and I decided I need to just hang them up but it looks haphazard to me every time I walk into this room. So I think I may move these older pics into updated frames. I also need to make sure there is writing on the back of each one identifying them. 

While this post may seem to be a lot to do about nothing, poking holes in my walls was hard. I don't know why. However, every time I poke another hole in my walls, it gets easier, metaphorically speaking.

love, Susan

4 comments:

  1. i'm a picture-hanger too! we have pictures everwhere in the house including a wall as you come into the house, but the wall is unfinished right now.

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  2. Those little holes, she is using brads/finish nails that are very thin.. you can almost just push back the surrounding stuff back into the hole and paint, without any filler at all. Not like she is hangin 'em up with a twenty penny spike or anything... I kinda like the mish-mash of frames in the "ironing" room. Different pictures from different times.. that old golden colored one with the black and white of my Mom sitting down, I remember that frame from back 50+ years.. so to see that picture set into a piece of S**t frame from China would wrench my heart...

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  3. Okay ... Gene ... I won't do that to your mom's photo.

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  4. How fun this was to show your father to see who you had up on the wall. That was a young one of him and Justn in the snow.

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