Frame Collage {Plus Aweseom Tip!}

I have been busy, busy this week putting together my classroom and I have been working from the ground up! I spent the first day organizing and then the second day placing all the centers and moving furniture. Now I get to start on some of the project pieces and wall decor items!

I have always envied those photo frame collages I see all around and wanted to replicate something like that on one of the walls in my classroom and I thought right above the self select art area would be perfect! I wanted different types of frames, but all the same color and without the backings so that I could put up and display the children's art easily. 

What do you think? Looks plain but that is because there is nothing in them yet. It is a great start though!

Click "Read More" to get the whole tutorial and an awesome tip that saved me a bunch of time!!

I knew I wanted to spray paint them and as usual, I put out a large piece of paper to do this one. If you don't have a large piece of paper, you could tape some together. But I go to thinking of how I wanted some type of template to help me with the hanging... then came the genius. I laid out my frames and such they way I wanted them to be on the wall. Do you notice that only 3 are actually frames and I have two wooden shadow boxes and, wait for it, both pieces of a box from a puzzle! Why not? I can still put art in it and it can hold small structures or sculptures too!

Then I spray painted them in place.

Once they were dry, I removed them and was left with a template I can use for hanging! Cool huh?!

I took this and hung it on the wall with some push pins. 

Then put my nails in, after I added the nails for each frame, I hung the frame to make sure it sat in the right spot- which was easy to tell from my template. 

I added all the nails for everything but the puzzle boxes and then took down the paper, leaving the nails in the wall. Then I just added my frames! I placed the puzzle box pieces and nailed them up separately, that was easy because I had the other pieces that were already hanging, to reference.

Done and ready for some artwork!! I am very happy with the way the room is coming but there is still a bunch to do on the walls! It is giving me a lot of projects to share on the blog though, so that is good! 

Stay tuned!