The Woodlands, Houston award winning Newborn photographer, Allison Parker | feather-nest

I was recently asked to contribute this post to a series on decorating with pictures on Kristen Duke’s blog. It was a great series and there are some really great ideas from a lot of different contributors!

It’s one of my favorite topics and it is so interesting to see how different people choose to use their photography to make their house a home! I love decorating . . . but more than anything, what makes me happy about my house is having my favorite images just about everywhere I look. Here are some of my favorite ways to decorate with pictures and a couple of inexpensive DIY tricks;o) Which have to be super simple or I don’t have the attention for it!

First, and this is my best cheap DIY trick, use cheap “art” to mount your own large prints. I am terribly fickle and I change my mind about every 6 months. These frames have been in place for a little over a year & I’ve already changed the prints 4 times:o)

Here is what I did . . . go to your local Garden Ridge or the like. Put your blinders on and look for frames that fit your decor only. I knew I wanted the clean black line of these beautiful (totally being sarcastic) tree prints below. Grab some spray photo adhesive at Wal-mart, pop out the “artwork” and use that to mount your new prints to. This will keep them from warping or bubbling if you do it right. You don’t need glass over prints and unless you are getting the really nice “museum quality” glass it just degrades your print anyway.  I get mine linen textured so it looks a little extra nice up close. It literally took me longer to unpackage my prints than it did to mount and hang them. And it was about $250 total.

Unless you are impulsive and reckless like me, this is a 2-person job . . . the print sticks fast & you can’t pull it up once it’s down.

Next DIY tip, print your favorite quotes, scriptures, symbols, etc on paper and slap it in a frame for a collage wall. I LOVE doing this because you can change it over and over at no cost. Play around with right justified text like the blue print I just printed on my laser jet (stairwell collage below). Mix in your child’s artwork, a couple of nice screen prints from etsy or something similar and your gallery wall just went up 10 points!

 

 

Now, this is my favorite way to decorate with pictures, and while not cheap, WORTH IT. . . I like true photographic print, layflat artbooks. This is what I sell all of my clients from their newborn sessions and this is what I treasure the most in my home. Good photography in a well designed book is priceless. My favorite things about photographic art books:, 1) it can sit in an easel and you can display a different page any given day without filling your walls, 2) it can stack on a table with your other coffee table books and add color, 3) they are archival and will stand the test of time , and  4) it can lay flat on the table to be displayed another way.

My girls love looking through their entire session that my friend, Leah Cook, shot for us last year. The best part is all the images are in one place for me to pass on to them someday. The good ones, the silly ones and the pouty ones;o)

And, I have to give one of my best friends Holly Mathis credit for helping me make my house pretty and functional for me. I get overwhelmed by color and pattern and just go too many directions at once. She comes in and starts bossing me around and I jump and things get done! If you need someone to walk into your house and tell you what stays, what goes, what you need to focus on, how to make it look 900 times better . . . Holly will do that for you!! She’s amazing and I can’t speak highly enough about her ability to change a space to be more functional or more beautiful. Someday I will share the home office she redid for me! It’s one of my favorite spaces now.

You can find Holly here.