Finally! After months and months and months and… you get the picture (ha! pun intended), we finally have a gallery wall in our family room. I thought the hardest part would be arranging the frames, but the hardest part turned out to be selecting what would go up on the wall! And dealing with a certain unruly zebra pencil sketch whose dimensions didn’t want to cooperate with the frames I’d purchased.

Let me give you a breakdown of how to hang it – I found this method to be SUPER  helpful, and I would definitely use it again.

Start by tracing your frames onto paper. I’ve seen all kinds of things on Pinterest, like craft paper or newspaper. I started this after Christmas (yes, I realize that was nearly 3 months ago… I am notoriously/embarrassingly slow at completely projects), so I grabbed a pile of used wrapping paper that was, errm, still is, waiting to be recycled.

If possible, employ a frame-tracing helper. An 8-lb puppy is excellent for this task, until she starts shredding all of the paper all over the floor…

Once you’ve got all your templates traced and cut, arrange them on your wall with tape. It was awesome how easy it was to rearrange the layout until I was happy with it. And great to see a “true-to-life” size layout instead of just doing sketches on the backs of junk mail envelopes. I had also arranged the frames & pictures on the floor, but seeing the arrangement up on the wall made it a little easier to evaluate what went next to what, how close/far apart should they be, etc.

From here, you can mark where you want the nails to go, or nail directly through the paper templates. Then get to the good part… hanging!

If you’re curious, here are some details on what I chose to hang. From top left: hummingbird photo by EZ Pudewa (of Creature Comforts fame), which I purchased from her Society6 shop / watercolor tree print by Angie Vandenbogaard / culinary postcard / zebra pencil sketch from my dad’s aunt / leftover suzani fabric from my placemat project.

I like that we still have room to add onto the gallery, especially on the sides, or upward to the ceiling. I don’t feel like it’s quite “finished” yet, but at least it’s a nice little collection to start from!

Have you hung a gallery wall? Have you tried the template method? Or did another tip work really well?

PS – all of the frames came from Michaels. They offer quite a few options in a Gallery collection, and you can even find/buy templates to follow if you don’t want to create one yourself. They weren’t too pricey, but I made sure to stock up when they were on sale, or take my 40%-off coupons with me. Another reason why it took a while to put this together 😉