Gallery walls.

I'm starting a tag for "frugal decorating". Ideas to make the best of your rental and make do with what you already have.

Karen, when she worked at MM, had this amazing decorated office wall. She just stuck all her posters and postcards up in a random but evenly spaced way. The overall effect was very cool. She gave me a couple of posters. Since I'm a hoarder of pretty things and concert tickets and sentimental cards I found her poster gallery idea very useful. Why keep a box of these sentimental papery things and never look at them, when they can be stuck up all in one big gallery and admired all the time? Especially when my bedroom has a built in robe with pale green glass instead of mirrors? Perfect surface for blu-tak!

Now any postcard, photo, ticket, or sketch, can be added easily to this area, and as well as reminding me of holidays and friends and family and things, it's a rather beautiful feature. The secret is, a big thing made of small things doesn't look messy, just detailed. Well, it needs a bit of a tidy, but other than that.

I've applied the same theory to hanging framed pictures. I takes a lot of work with 3M sticky hooks, getting them in the right place. But the result is, I can hang a lot of small, low-value pictures in one area and the overall effect is very pleasing. Small pictures look silly when they float randomly on large walls, so they look a lot better when they are all herded together.

This is my first ever cross stitch.