I did some orga­niz­ing today and was excited to find sev­eral adver­tise­ments from the 60’s and 70’s that I had pur­chased from eBay last year.  The ads were for my ancestor’s Denim Man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­pany, Cone Mills.  I was going to frame a col­lec­tion of the ads to hang in my office.

The tagline in many of the ads is, “Improves Your Over­all Appear­ance”. The peo­ple in the ads are wear­ing denim over­alls. How clever (took me a minute to get that!! Haha)

1977 ad for “Mom Jeans” . Denim on denim. This whole ad just makes me laugh.

I also found a post­card on Wikipedia sent from my great-great aunt Etta Cone to Gertrude Stein in Flo­rence, Italy in 1911. I might frame this and add to my new “fam­ily wall”. I did a post last year on Gertrude Stein’s rela­tion­ship with my great-great aunts and how she intro­duced them to Matisse and Picasso.

I’m on the Blue Ridge Park­way Foundation’s Coun­cil of Advi­sors, so I thought it would be nice to frame these posters of the Parkway.

I think it’s always nice to have a “col­lec­tion” or group­ing of art in your home. I’m not tired of framed botan­i­cals or intaglios yet, but I think it is some­times more inter­est­ing to have “mean­ing­ful” works of art to give your home a per­sonal touch. I like to use old let­ters from fam­ily mem­bers, ink draw­ings, keys, mag­a­zine arti­cles, post­cards from trav­els, tick­ets, or maps.

There are many great ways to hang group­ings of art.  Pic­ture rails are always very visu­ally appeal­ing, espe­cially with a vari­ety of frames.

I love fram­ing black and white pho­tos in old win­dows and doors.

It’s also inter­est­ing to use twine and clothes­pins to hang pho­tographs in a reclaimed wood frame.

If you have old hand­writ­ten let­ters from fam­ily mem­bers you can enlarge them on a copier and have them framed.

Frame post­cards sent to you, or ones col­lected while traveling.

Fram­ing post­cards in “float­ing” frames always looks great!

If you don’t have your own post­cards, you can order a col­lec­tion of vin­tage post­cards online.

You can make a col­lage out of your favorite child­hood Pen­guin Book covers.

They come in a box of 100 post­cards for $16.50 on Ama­zon. The col­lec­tion includes many iconic child­hood Pen­guin books, like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Bronte’s Wuther­ing Heights.

Ama­zon sells a post­card col­lec­tion of 100 ground­break­ing Van­ity Fair Cov­ers “rep­re­sent­ing more than twenty years of cos­mopoli­tan Jazz Age design in one box”.

It would be fun to cre­ate a col­lage of ticket stubs from every con­cert you’ve attended.

Cre­ate fun shapes, like hearts, using mean­ing­ful items.

Make a “love map” using maps from the places you and your spouse met, mar­ried, and cur­rently live. There’s a great tuto­r­ial here.

Cut a map of a mean­ing­ful place into fours and frame each sec­tion individually.

Have a col­lec­tion of keys from for­mer res­i­dences? You can always frame them!

Kids can be very artis­tic and cre­ate inter­est­ing works of art. It’s nice to have a framed col­lec­tion of children’s art to hang on the wall in their bed­room. You can also frame pages from a child’s favorite book.

For girls, it’s fun to frame doll out­fits in shad­ow­boxes or ones from mom’s child­hood (if she still has them. I know my mom doesn’t!).

Once you frame your “mean­ing­ful art,” you can use this great resource for inspi­ra­tion on dif­fer­ent ways to hang a wall gallery.

1.Ebay  2.Ebay  3.Ebay  4.Wikipedia  5.Blue Ridge Park­way Blog  6.Topix  7.Retro Ren­o­va­tion, 8. Pin­ter­est  9.Pin­ter­est  10.Pin­ter­est  11.Pin­ter­est  12.Pin­ter­est  13.Pin­ter­est  14.Cote De Texas  15.Decor Allure  16. Tri­an­gle Hon­ey­moon  17.Ama­zon  18.Ama­zon  19. BBC  20.The State of Things  21. Min­i­moz Blog  22. Wis­te­ria  23. Pin­ter­est  24. Decor Allure  25. Trynka  26. Pin­ter­est