Spirals & Spatulas: Music Photo Gallery Wall

You guys. We are this close to being DONE with the piano room, and it makes me so, so happy! Remember when I played photographer and took pictures of our piano, clarinet, and French horn? Well, I turned them into this:

I'm so happy to finally have something fun on that big, blank wall! We picked seven favorites from all the photos I took, ordered some prints, stuck them in some Ikea frames, and hung them on the wall! Here are the photos we chose to use:

French Horn + Clarinet

Sheet Music

Clarinet

Piano

French Horn

Clarinet

French Horn

The three big frames have openings for 11.5x11.5" photos, and the four smaller frames had 4.5x4.5" openings. I ordered the small prints from Wal-Mart as 5x7s and just trimmed them down. For the bigger photos, I ordered 12x12 prints from Persnickety Prints for $2 each. Persnickety Prints is great... the shipping fee was a flat $5, and they came in just two days! The print quality is really great too. For less than $15, I had all seven photos printed and ready to frame!

The frames are Ikea's Ribba frames, $10 each for the small ones and $18 each for the big ones. I affixed all the pictures to their mats with acid-free tape, then attached the hanging wire to the back of each frame.

Jeff and I spent entirely too long deciding which order the pictures should go in, then we took one last look at our giant, empty wall...

We placed the frames along the baseboard to get a feel for how wide we wanted everything to be:

Then there was an hour or so of complex frame hanging, complete with laser levels and regular levels and pencil marks and a complicated system involving string (to make sure they'd all be perfectly in line with each other).

And then... we had this!

I feel a bit like a pro photographer having my pictures blown up and framed all fancy-like. Considering I started this project with the expectation that it wouldn't work (and I'd end up buying prints from a professional photographer), I'm pretty proud of the results.

I like to decorate our house with things that have meaning. Especially when I'm hanging things on the walls, I love it when there's a story behind what we chose to go in a certain spot. I love our family wedding photos in the guest room, the antique mirror from Pennsylvania in the powder room, our yearly Jeff-and-Katie 4x6s in our bathroom, and the "I Love You Because" frame in our closet.

I especially love these music prints because they're personal and special, but they just look like regular art. Plus I just love how they make that wall finally look like part of the room.

(This is what you can see when you walk in the front door and look to the left a bit!)

Love it!

On an unrelated note, I stuck some of my milk glass pieces on the little black table, and I think I like them there. Deciding what to put on this table is one of the trickiest decorating issues in the whole house for me. I usually change it up every week or so, but these milk glass pieces have been there for almost a month now, so they may be staying!