Alicia’s Decorating Dilema 101- Picture This

Last year after my son’s birth, my husband and I moved out of our large one bedroom apartment to a smaller, more affordable two bedroom space while we save for a home. The biggest challenge we face is less space, and our family photos exemplify the dilema perfectly. Only two walls in our new home have enough space to hold photos, so I needed to pair down the clutter. I had a huge hodge-podge of frames that were the product of having my pictures spread throughout a large apartment with high ceilings.

The first step in the process was to go through the photos and decide which were the most important. Trimming out old snapshots and moving them to the family photo albums helped a lot. I then narrowed it down to the special shots from specific occasions- wedding photos, holidays, and my son’s introduction to his family. I still needed some inspiration, so I went online to look at various collage frames. On Target.com I saw a lot of creative and fun frames, but nothing with the flexibility I wanted- many had inspirational phrases I didn’t want to be stuck with for years. What I wanted was the ability to adjust the style of the frame throughout the year, not a one-size-fits-all greeting card phrase.

Enter Crayola. Crayola sells “Window Crayons”- basically non-toxic grease markers in primary colors. You can write or draw on a glass pane and then come back later and wipe the glass clean with glass cleaner, even months down the road, and create a different design. This can also be done with eyeliner, but eyeliner isn’t available in the colors I wanted. I purchased the Window Crayons from a hobby store and picked up two RE Collage Frames with white matting from Target. I three 8″x10″ black frames from my orginal collection. I shifted the large photos into the 8″x10″ frames and put those frames in the dining room. On the frames with matting, I used the Crayola Window Crayons to create a generalized, abstract winter design that will look nice until spring peeps its head over the horizon and I’m ready to change the design. These two frames will look great and fit comfortably in the living room.