First Crafty New Year's Resolution

Time to the tackle the next project on my to do list. I'm going to finish matting and framing a number of prints from the family archives. I need to make some decisions about how many pictures to display, and I need to make sure that everyone is represented. The real challenge is going to be finding a suitable wall (or walls) for displaying them.

This project counts as a real UFO. When we helped my parents move from their apartment into a long term care facility I was the one who collected many of the old family photographs. Back in 2004, around the time my mother died, I started going through the pictures and collecting frames and mattes. I first got the idea of what to do with them when I saw what a great job my old friend Kathy Allen had done with all her old family photos. She custom cut all the mattes herself and has them going up a winding staircase in her beautifully restored home. When I first started tackling this project I considered cutting the mattes myself like Kathy did but in the end I got some great deals at Dollar Stores and decided to mold my project to the frames I could easily buy.

Now that 2009 is approaching it is time to attack the next step of this project. I've more or less corralled the pictures, frames and mattes in one place and now I have to frame and hang all the pictures. I tried, without any luck, to find a great photo of a beautifully displayed collection of family photographs to illustrate this post.

Please send me a link if you find any great ideas for how I should hang them when I'm done. And if you've done this yourself I'd love to see a picture of your finished result.