What To Do Now?
What are the main reasons that people get their pictures taken, or have their children's picture taken?
More often than not, you have a couple frames in your home that house the typical, yearly photo...it may be the school shot, or an old family photo from Christmas. You want to keep those frames updated in your house because, well...that's what we do..we hang pictures of our family in our home...
It's fun to look at, to compare each year how someone has changed, how much she's grown, watching the chubby baby disappear...
The thing is, although I too love to have those silly school pictures up on a wall...the picture where I dreaded the day because I wasn't sure if she'd brush her hair back or if the photographer would get her to smile in the one shot that he was limited to take of the hundreds of students he was photographing in a small amount of time...
However, I LOVE LOVE LOVE having pictures that express my kids personalities all over my house...I love pictures so much that my husband finally had to put his foot down and say, "Sweetheart, please...please just give me one wall to look at that doesn't have the girls faces peering down at me"...
And so, I went out back and took pictures of our backyard and put THOSE up on the wall...yep, it's all about the story!
Okay...so what if you step out of the norm and you go and get your pictures taken...on location...these candid, not so posed, personality type pictures...well, now what?
Are they supposed to replace the school ones on the wall (not for me...nope, those school ones are my fuel for the future I tell you!!!)
Okay then, what in the world do you do with a huge variety of pictures...you can't very well enlarge all of them and put them all in frames throughout your house...because seriously, who wants 15 pictures of Johnny in a blue shirt looking at you every time you turn a corner?
I hope I can give you a couple of ideas here:
First off, I invested in one of these doohickies...I *heart* it...oh, I so love it dearly...I change out my 4 x 6 just about weekly...I can print off a bunch of photos (especially side photo shoots that I do with my girls) and just pop them right up there!
Another idea: Get a cool frame wall with lots of sizes...mix match your frames so that you feel like you can mix match your photos too...This is yet another Pottery Barn catalog perusal.
If you don't want to invest more money in lots of frames, you could go with a storyboard (custom made by yours truly:) That way you get 4 pictures in ONE...you only need one frame and depending on the "story" you want to tell...it could be hung in an office, a playroom or even your kitchen.
You have all these photos to choose from...you don't want to waste them because they all show a different moment...another way to capture them is to make a collage or on this blog, it's called a Creative Creation. You can print off an 8 x 8 easily and keep it in a coffee table book/scrapbook to look through often. My girls look at their books daily...I'm not kidding...they so enjoy just looking at how they've changed...they like that I "talk" to them on their pages too...I just add another 8 x 8 every other month or so, or for a special event...My youngest only has a few pages, but my eldest has already filled her book.
I seriously could go on and on about how to incorporate all those images into your own home decor...your home is your place of rest...it's the place where memories are remembered and lived out. Celebrate it...let your home reflect the all the personalities of those that inhabit it!
And most of all...ENJOY!
OK so where did you get the photos on a stick display? This method seems about my speed. Stick it on the wall then stick pictures in it. Right up my alley. It could even be hung crooked and still look like "art" :)
That stick thing is actually from Pottery Barn...they put it in the catalog and then take it out...put it in...take it out...you could maybe check at a Pier One or even for something similar you could use those desk rings...that hold letters, like at Office Max?