Family Art Collage Wall

Hello again!  Today I want to show you my latest project, which solved two big problems at once.  One: what to do with mountains of kids' artwork.  Two: What to do with the very tall wall on the staircase landing in our entryway.  My kiddos love love love to create, so I always have a stack that needs showing off.  So I wanted to create a special place where we could display it.  I needed something that would be easy to rotate.  But when the boys and I worked on special pieces to contribute to our church art show, I knew those needed a permanent home.  Thus the idea for the collage wall was born.

I blogged about my mixed media piece here.

My mother-in-law made me this cute clipboard...

I may or may not have had to replace one of the clips and the word "artist" because my little "helpers" decided to disassemble it before I could put it up...

And that got me thinking about other ways I could display the kids' art by just clipping it up, but I wanted something that would really give their artwork some presence and show that we are proud to display it in our home.  Then (hooray!) I found these two enormous empty frames at a yard sale for $2 each.  They were a really gross maroon color, but a few coats of spray paint later they look fantastic.  My awesome friend Kelli contributed some chicken wire, which I attached to the back of the frame with a staple gun.

I let the kids decorate plain mini clothespins for attaching the artwork.

The kids really loved picking out their favorite pieces for our first display.  They did most of the cool projects they picked in the art classes they took this spring with my friend April Staker.  If you are at all local, I totally recommend her classes for kids -- the boys learned so much and grew to love creating so much more!

This is really an ideal solution for displaying lots of sizes and types of artwork.  They can either put in several small pieces, as shown above, or one really big piece.  They love to color on those big paper rolls from IKEA, so we have a lot of those.  As an extra bonus, hanging up those big pieces makes it really easy to take a good picture of it, so we can save the picture and eventually lose all the giant pieces of paper. :)

Oh, and here's a funny story.  I cut this vinyl saying out and put it up, but it just didn't seem right somehow.  It took me two days to realize that that wasn't what I meant to put up at all!  I meant to do "Home is where the he{art} is" but somewhere between my brain and setting it up on the computer it got switched to this.  What do you think?  Lucky mistake, or should I switch it?

Hanging this collage in the stairwell worked out perfectly because I can hang things both higher and lower than  I really could on a normal wall because you start out either below or above the whole thing anyway.  I have lots of room to expand, especially above, as we create more special pieces that we want to keep up more permanently.

Thanks for stopping by!