Photo Wall- How to

A few people have asked me to describe how I made my daughters photo wall from my post about redecorating her room. see it here.

So here goes.

Materials-

2x4 piece of wood cut to the length you want your wall covered. I believe the one I did was 8 feet long
Paint (I used black)
Eye hooks (I used 10)
wall mounting screws- 4-5 (for newbies to home repair- PLEASE have someone who has done this before do this- you don't want huge holes in your wall!)
power drill
Buttons that do not have holes in the middle you can see through- 4-5
Ribbon -about 20 yards- can be different kinds but it was best when i used at least 1/3" thick and a more sturdy ribbon
Hot glue gun- glue
frames- 60 (i got these ones from Ikea)
Pictures- 60 (4x6)

OK, so the beginning step is when you either need to be versed in the handyman trade- or have a lovely husband who is. Since I am not I had my husband help!

Paint your 2x4 (ok, maybe you don't need a husband for that one!) - LET DRY COMPLETELY!

Drill screws into your 2x4 at even lengths across. This will be HEAVY when its done- so please make sure to do enough because you don't want this falling down! Our wood was 8" long and we did 5 screws.

Drill 10 eye hooks (or however many you want) at even lengths across the 2" side of the 2x4. Please make sure to leave enough room between so the pictures do not touch. I believe we did every 10 inches.

Now you can screw the wall mounts into the wall and then your 2x4 into the wall mounts. (again- lining those up is not the easiest- you will need help even if you are good at doing it to have someone hold this up for you)

After that is in you can cover the screw holes with buttons- I just used my trusty glue gun to put them on.

Now comes the pictures - the frames from ikea are nice because they have the "clip" holders in them. Each picture normally has 4 clips (one one each side) I alternated landscape and portrait as I put the backs onto the ribbon.

First you cut your ribbon to the length of however many pictures your putting in each column. I did 6 pictures (any more then that was too heavy for the ribbon). Since I alternated landscape and portrait I needed to allow for 36" if pictures, 1" in between each picture and another 10" for the top to allow for connecting it to the eye hooks. So each piece of ribbon needs to be 51" long.

Start by taking a back piece of the frame (the cardboard piece) and popping out all of the holes the clips would sit in.

Next alternate portrait and landscape and weave the ribbon through the holes hot gluing the whole part that touches the cardboard. Repeat this until you have a ribbon strand with 6 cardboard pieces with 1" in between each.

After you have that you can put your pictures in (I put a little dot of glue to keep those in too).

Cover your pictures with the glass that came with them and place the clips on the 2 remaining holes the ribbon is not through.

Repeat this for all 10 ribbons (make sure to have 5 start with a landscape frame, and 5 with a portrait frame)

Once those are done carefully tie the top piece of the ribbon to the eye hooks and you are done!

Please make sure to put this high enough little hands cannot get to or in a room little kids will not be in- if this was to fall on a child it would hurt them very badly!

If you make something like this I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see how it turns out! Please share!