Bringing Imagery Into Your Real Life

We have been in the middle of a complete kitchen make-0ver, and one thing I was really set on was incorporating more imagery in our space. We are passionate about the food we eat and we love that we get to grow a lot of our produce right in our back yard. Anyone who follows me on Instagram will know that I’m constantly taking photos of my produce (like a proud dad). I have compiled a significant number of images (via iPhone camera and film cameras), and I wanted to actually use them in our life!

Enter Artifact Uprising. An amazing company out of Denver (our favorite city!)… can’t go wrong. Their mission is to produce products that will get images off of our devices and into a tangible form that can be part of our life.

As a photographer, I really believe that photos are best enjoyed in tangible form. There is just something magical about holding an image in your hands. Seeing the texture of the paper make the image come to life. I want our home to be filled with images that speak of who we are and what we value.

These Square Prints are the perfect way for me to do that. I was so impressed with the quality and affordability of them. I’m going to have to fight the urge to not order these on a constant basis.

But, I also wanted to figure out a creative way to display them rather than simply slapping a strip of tape to their back and plastering our walls with them. So, here’s a closer to look into how I constructed these displays… hopefully it will inspire you to also bring images into your life and onto your walls!

I love repurposed wood! If I could have it in every room of our home, I would.
Perhaps I will, actually.

I simply used two longer fence boards that have some awesome looking colors in them and sealed them with a satin clear coat. Done.

The middle part was a little more complicated. For the end caps, I cut two pieces of the same wood at a 45 degree angle and put a coat of white paint on it. Once the paint dried, I just used a screw driver to scuff it up a bit. Bam… it looked like I pulled it straight off of an old farm house. I knew I wanted to connect the two end caps with hemp rope, so I just drilled a small hole in the middle of each board so I could run the rope through it and it would come out the back. This way it would look cleaner and more simplistic.

I tossed around several ideas for how to actually get the photos hung on the rope, and I finally landed on this one. These are just silver binder clips that I got at Office Max. I ran the rope right through them and clipped each side of the photo. Once I got them in place, I removed one side of the clip (they just come right off) and suddenly it doesn’t look much like a cheap clip anymore and it looks simple and clean again.

I also love that I can easily replace these prints if I ever want to… which will probably happen fairly often around here!

The other project that I wanted to do for our kitchen was to find some way to showcase some of the herbs that we grow and cook with.

Again, I used repurposed wood for this. I simply stacked three boards on top of each other and then used another board just like these to run perpendicular to them on the back to attach them securely. Doing this also makes the whole thing stand out from the wall slightly which gives it a cool look.

To attach the images, I just used regular silver thumb tacks at the top and bottom of each image. I was careful not to actually stick the image, but to just use the edge of the tack to hold the paper in place.

Both of these projects only took me about an hour to complete and I only really needed a saw + drill + screws. These boards literally came out of our backyard where the neighbors fence was falling down! No need to spend a lot of money on things for it to look cool.

Again… Artifact Uprising is one stellar company! I have loved everything that I have ordered through them, and more importantly I love their mission.

So, I challenge you to find creative ways to get your images off of your computer or phone and into your real life!