Well, what do you think? Kinda random? Kinda cool? Don't mind my half-dressed kid. He's still in that - "I'm potty trained but need to be able to pull down my pants ASAP so I don't have an accident" phase :)
Okay, so how I did this. It's not an original idea, I saw something similar done several months ago but I can't remember the source, so, I had to wing it.
- Find interesting branch. This one was um, borrowed, from the UCLA campus. Don't worry, it was already on the ground.
- My branch was pretty thin, so I used medium sized wall hooks and screwed two of them into the wall and then rested the branch on top of them (think: how a curtain rod hangs from it's hardware)
- Choose your fav photos. I had 26 but ended up only using 24 because I ran out of space.
- I found a free high-res polariod frame online - again, can't remember where, but here is a similar one. The dimensions of a polariod are not a normal standard print size. So, I designed them to be regular 4x6 prints and just had them have a white area at the bottom that I cut off after I had the 4x6's printed.
- I used black posterboard squares to re-enforce the photos so that they wouldn't bend while hanging. I attached the photos to the posterboard with scrapbook adhesive squares. What a great invention. You can find them at Michaels nice and cheap.
- I used a small hole punch to make the holes at the top of the photos for hanging - I used a 1/8" punch because I didn't want the hole to be too large.
- So that the photos could hang reletively straight, I bought some basic jewelry rings ($2.99 for 50) at Michaels and inserted them into the holes that I just punched. They will be in the jewelery section obviously.
- I wanted an organic look, so I used twine to hang the photos from the branch. Looks cool, but it was a pain to tie each one so that the photo hung straight. Twine is a twisty type of string so it wanted to twist the photos around. I had to be very careful as I tied each photo to the branch. I left the twine long at the top because I liked the way it curled and hung. I would love to see how a different type of string would work!
That's it!
Oh, and you might notice holes and rings on the BOTTOM of photos too. I was originally going to hang them from eachother with the twine, but when I did it made them twist too much so I had to abandon that idea and hang them all individually. I think the rings at the bottom help keep them straight since they add some weight, so you might want to do something similar?
