since you asked…

I’ve had some posts and emails asking how I made the collage on my living room wall. It’s really quite easy, but it took me some trial and error, and a couple weekends. Here’s what I did, step by step.

1. Figure out what photos you want to use: I brought all of mine into Photoshop and cropped them to 12 x 12 at 300 dpi. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can always go to a photo lab. Make sure you use a coordinating set of photos with a clean background. Otherwise, it can look cluttered, and we’re going for clean. If you’re taking the photos yourself, you might want to read some of my photo tips. I personally think that black and white photos or a light sepia tone works best. You don’t want colors to fight.

2. Choose coordinating paper: I am on the creative team of Designer Digitals, and am partial to their designer papers. For my wall, I used Kellie Mize’s Little Black Dress 2. Using their designs requires you to print them yourself. An alternative is to choose designer scrapbook papers at your local craft store. Just choose a collection so everything is coordinated.

3. Buy 12″ x 36″ x 1″ blocks of styrofoam: My hubby humored me and cut these into 12 x 12″ blocks with a utility knife. He is very engineery, so I knew he would cut them perfectly. And that’s important if you want to line them up in a grid. Somebody mentioned using foam board for this, but I specifically wanted to use styrofoam because I wanted the depth.

4. Affix the photos and papers: I found that Elmer’s cement glue worked the best for this because it worked with styrofoam and didn’t ripple the paper. I was warned against spray adhesives because they could melt the styrofoam. After gluing, make sure you have a good adhesion by pressing the styrofoam upside down against a flat surface.

5. Edge the styrofoam with ribbon: I used a 7/8″ matte black ribbon. Start by attaching it with two short straight pins, and then pull it as tight as you can, attaching it with two pins on each side. I colored the pin heads with a black marker so they would blend with the ribbon.

6. Attach to your wall: There may be an easier way to do this, but I ended up gluing four 2 x 2″ paper squares to each corner on the back of the photo blocks. That made a nice, smooth surface so I could attach foam adhesive squares to each corner and press onto the wall. Foam corners don’t adhere very well to styrofoam.

I had fun doing this, and probably spent $75 or less on the entire project. If I was loaded, I would have printed everything on canvas. But it would have been quite spendy.

If you don’t want to use photos, you could just use coordinating scrapbook paper.

I’d love to see photos of anyone’s similar projects. If you decide to give this a try, I hope to hear from you!