collage wall for a giant wall

This project made me SO excited. I’ve wanted to do a big, bold collage wall for a long, long time. For several months we had the condo on the market, it didn’t sell, blah blah blah. So now we are staying put, while still keeping our eyes open to looking for dream homes and/or plots of land. It feels good to be cozy for now, there are many great perks to condo living: indoor parking, the gym, a pool !!!, and no yard to care for.

Seth asked me to create a collage wall of “family photos” a while ago. It took me a while to land on the look and design, but I love the end result:

This wall is pretty big, and so I knew I wanted to go with larger frames and prints. These frames are sized 16×20 and hold an 11×14 print with a lovely mat. Big.

Obviously larger frames are usually quite expensive. Seth’s mom let me know that Shopko was going out of business and I found these for a large discount. They are actually higher quality than I expected, the mat has some pretty texture that takes it up a notch IMO.

Credit from left to right, top row to bottom:

Seth and P from her baptism day/fall family photos by Mara Elaine Photography.
A bedroom self portrait I took this January.
My stepdad snapped this photo of Seth and I from our first Thanksgiving, 2017.
A lovely detail from P’s newborn session with Jess Devins of Foto Film Studios.
P’s first smile behind the lens, capture by me.
Another newborn session favorite, also by Foto Film Studios.
Seth, Astro, and I from our Christmas tree shoot, same as above.
P being a squishy, sweet babe at Kimi Coopet’s studio for Oh Hello! Photo.

I printed our images from my favorite professional lab, White House Color Correct aka WHCC. I use them for my client work and they are the best. It was hard to narrow down our choices, of course, but I wanted to choose images that best represent our family now. I’m sure we’ll be swapping out images as time goes by.

I love it! I have some photos from P’s baptism that need frames and will go to the left of her door and we just had our engagement photos taken and I imagine I’ll want some of those in frames, too. It feels so good to get photos up on the wall. I never regret it, even if it’s a bit of a hassle.

I’d love to see you over on Instagram, follow along with my daily photos here: