Crafty Dad: Photo Display

So last week I declared that I would hang things on the walls this weekend, and I have!  I have hung four things, which is not great considering there are about ten more to go.  A good deal of our battle, though, came from deciding what to hang up at all.  We did not do a great job of sorting before we moved from Maryland, and that was mostly due to the fact that we did not know how or where we would be living after Paul and Sarahlynn's house.

(Long rant about personal and responsible financial decisions redacted. Another post for another time)

Anny will tell you that I am a picture snob when it comes to actually printing them.  I take hundreds every month and now there there is Facebook and Picasa and Flickr I share more than I used to, but printing is a stretch for me.  Fun fact: it's only January 9th and I have already deleted more than 120 this month.

We have lots of wall space in our apartment and have been talking about hanging things since about week two of living here.  Clearly this is not a priority for me.  In the end I decided that what I really want is a way to have pictures displayed, but not have to frame-commit to pictures.  The fewer holes in the wall the better, or something like that.

We got a gift box with a really pretty royal purple colored ribbon and one day I thought that it would be cool to find a use for.  The next day my thought evolved to using it for a photo display of some sort.  We decided where to use the new find, roughly.  I was concerned about a sag in the middle.  While measuring to decide where to put it on the wall and something clicked: USE the yard stick to support the project!  Less nails, more support!

Anyway, here is what we did:

Started with a yard stick and drilled holes at the 1 inch, 18 inch and 35 inch marks of the stick.  This made nailing to the wall later much easier!

I hot glued the purple ribbon to the yard stick after centering it.  Turns out I did not let the glue get hot enough before trying to put the ribbon on.  Solution? Anny pulled out the iron and used a VERY gentle setting to melt the glue through the ribbon to flatten out the spots.

Using the drilled holes I put a nail in each side.  (There is a hole in the middle if we need to give more support later, but I did not use it.)  I did the drilled holes mostly in an effort to not have to put a whole lot of power into nailing with the nice ribbon on it. 

We have hung the pictures with magnets, so neither the pictures or the ribbon are going to be hurt when we change things in and out. 

Total cost of the project was one dollar, for magnets. Had I thought through it better, I would have just brought home some plain magnets from work that we can use for more pictures.  The ribbon was free from a gift basket, the yard stick was free (to someone else, years and years ago) from a paint and room-design store. 

This give me flexibility to change pictures in and out - or a designated place and way to display Christmas Cards next year - which should lead me to print more pictures, which makes Anny happy.  This is a win win project!  It took less than ten minutes of work time, too!