Making a home art gallery

The end of year holiday week is a great time to redecorate your home, especially with drawing and art that your family makes.

We have taken the chance to build our own art gallery in our hallway. As we go up the stairs, we are slowly covering the wall space with framed works of art from our own creation, as well as our travels from the past year. This means the drawings that we’ve done together, some postcards and admission tickets that we’ve gathered, and some posters that we found from our trips.

We make the art choices with our kids. It is a little curator experience. Which of all of our art and collected pictures should go on the wall? We choose together, and make sure they will fit the frames, and then do a few pieces at a time. The goal is that the gallery will grow over the week, and over the year.

Some of our favorite pieces are little collages from special moments from the past year. For example we made this small collage from our trip to the Railway Museum in the Netherlands, in Utrecht, by assembling postcards we bought there, along with our admissions tickets, and then a small inscription of when we went.

To make our Gallery in the most affordable way possible, we love Ikea. They have lots of lightweight, white frames to use, under the Fiskbo line. We bought about $50 worth of frames, in 12 x 16, 8.5 x 11 inches, 5 x 7 inches, and 16 x 20, so that we could have a variety of shapes and sizes on the walls. Each of the frames is under $10, ranging from about $2 to 7, so you can afford to get a lot and make a real gallery.