how to hang a frame collage

Today I'm going to share with you what I believe is the very BEST way to organize and hang up a collage of frames on your wall.
There are several different methods to accomplish this, and trust me, I've tried them all. What I have found to be the easiest and least-frustrating way is what I'm about to show you.

For this project, you will need:

• painter's tape (masking tape is fine, too, but painter's tape is made to go on walls without leaving residue and smoothly adheres)
• white rectangular plastic tablecloth (dollar tree!)
• sharpie
• level
• tape measure
• nails and hammer (or screws, wall anchors, and a drill for really heavy items)

Once you decide which wall you want to use, I recommend marking the center of the wall horizontally, and then 59-60" up from the bottom. Why 59-60" up from the floor? Because that's the average eye level, and you want the center of whatever you're hanging - whether it be one piece or a grouping - to be at eye level. It's just a little design rule I picked up in art school, and you'll find designers backing me up all over blogland and TV. Anyways - once you've found the spot, instead of marking on your walls with a pencil, just use painter's tape!

After you've found your center, you'll need to decide just how large of a space you want your entire arrangement to take up. This of course all depends on how many items you plan to hang. Then, measure and mark again with painter's tape. For example's sake, I believe mine was something around 40" high and 60" wide. So the top and bottom of the space are each 20" from the center mark, sides are 30" out. Now you have your perimeter to work within, and it's perfectly centered up on your wall.

Next, lay out your white table cloth - on the floor where you have lots of room! - and tape out a rectangle the SAME size as the one you just taped on your wall. I also trimmed off excess tablecloth to make working a little easier.

These are the frames I had to work with. They didn't all end up in the collage, but it was still a good idea to lay it all out to see what was there. Here we have a nice mixture of wedding, couple, maternity, newborn, and one recent toddler photo, along with a letter "B". Also a very special painting by my friend Molly that captures the very moment I said, "Yes!" to hubby. 

HERE is what makes this method the absolute best. All you have to do is lay your frames within the perimeter on your white tablecloth, and play around until you are happy with the arrangement. No deciding once it's on the wall with a million holes punched, no attaching and reattaching papers cut out to the same size of your frames. You do it all here. Once you're happy with what you've got, make sure things are spaced out evenly and it's all balanced.

Trace around your frames & items with a sharpie onto the white tablecloth. Pull your frames off, and you'll see the outline of your exact arrangement. While doing this, make sure your tablecloth is laying real smooth & not bunched up anywhere, so your shapes translate nicely.
The next part is super easy AND essential, even though it sounds tricky. You want to make a little mark where all of your nails are going to go, so you'll just flip your items over and put them underneath the table cloth in their appropriate spots. Find the hangers for each item, and make your marks. This will take you less than 2 minutes.
NOW everything is ready to go! Take your tablecloth and tape it up on the wall, on top of your previously outlined space, lining up your edges. (Mine wasn't perfectly perfect, but it was close enough). Here you can see where everything will go.

These next few steps will go by in about 5 minutes, which is spectacular.
Hammer your nails into your nail marks.

For those items that need two or more nails, make sure your previous marks are level once it's actually on the wall. If not, just sharpie over it and fix it. Here's an example of a correction I had to make:

Pop in all your nails, and just pull off the tablecloth and tape, so your wall will look something like this:

Then, hang everything up and level it all out. Voila!

This is a very narrow wall that curves around into our kitchen, and our couch is not exactly centered on the wall since part of it peninsulas through the main living area (sounds crappy but looks nice). Our living room has come together more since I took this photo, thanks to the curtains I made and some paintings I created for the space. I'll give you a full living room reveal sometime soon, promise :)

I saw this image on Pinterest and told myself, oh, so that's how you hang things when furniture is not centered on the wall. It really helped me decide how to put things together. I would've expanded further, but I had a light switch that prevented me from doing much more.

source

P.S. Please check out her blog, her house is amazing!

If you're hesitant to hang an arrangement on your wall because you just don't know where to start, THIS is where you start :) Super easy. I bet I did the whole thing from start to finish in 30 minutes. I have literally spent hours doing this other ways and really have found this to be the best! I hope you'll use it in your home!