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I’m getting closer and closer to having ONE room in this house that is completely and truly done!!!! I can’t wait for that day 🙂 Pip is really liking her desk hutch, but the project I am writing about today is one of her favorites for her room and it turned out a lot easier than I imagined. And it used up a lot of scrap plywood I had been accumulating–high fives all around! Here is the DIY scrap wood heart collage I put up on one of her walls:
I started this back in the summer and then procrastination hit…sometimes it is the silliest things that throw me off the finish line for a project. Picking out the pictures is what did it this time! I had a niggling of a feeling of wanting to do the picture-picking-out last weekend so I jumped on it, and now the project’s got a check mark next to it on my to-do list.
Supplies you need for the Scrap Wood Heart Collage project
- A bunch of 3/4″ and 1/2″ scrap pieces of plywood around 4 x 6 size (or the size of the pictures you want to hang)
- paint (I used the small tubes you can buy in the craft section at Walmart or paint section at a craft store)
- Elmer’s Craft Bond glue dots (you could use any permanent adhesive you’ve got or prefer)
Cut up your scrap wood
This used up a surprising amount of scrap 3/4″ and 1/2″ plywood. I wanted both sizes because I thought it would add some visual interest to the picture collage. Most of them are 4 x 6, but a few were smaller because it was what I had left.
Play around with the placement of the pieces until you are happy with how it looks.
Number the pieces so you know where they are going to go when you’re done. I wrote the number at the top of each one in it’s spot so I knew which way the piece would be oriented once it was on the wall. That helps once you are drilling the hole you hang it with.
Paint the fronts and sides, decide on placement
I painted the entire front and sides since I wasn’t sure if I would be filling the whole front with the picture or cropping them.
This next part is sheer brilliance if you are looking at ever hanging a collage of any sort on your wall. I wish I could give credit to whomever I got this from (I thought it was on Pinterest, but I can’t find the pin on my boards). Lay out your design on a piece of paper and trace your pictures on the paper.
Make your marking and drilling templates for hanging
Then mark the spot where the hanger is on the pictures. I made two templates–one for the 4″ side and another for the 6″ side, depending on how the picture is oriented. I drilled a hole in the template and marked the nail spot.
Next, I used the same templates to drill the hanging holes in the pictures.
I used a piece of tape on the drill so I knew how far to drill into the picture. The template was 1/4″ plywood so I put the tape on at 1/2″ so the hole was a 1/4″.
Nail in your hanging nails
Tape the paper up in the spot you want the collage to hang. I used my measuring tape to make sure it was hanging straight and equal distance from the walls.
Put a nail in each spot you marked previously.
Pull the paper template off the wall. If you pull toward you, it will pull out the nails, but if you pull from the right or left, the nail head will rip through the paper instead of pulling out.
So do you agree that this is one of the best hints ever??? When I hang pictures on the wall, I put about 4 holes for each hanger before I get it in the right spot. Can you imagine the havoc I would have wreaked on this wall with 36 pictures to hang??!!
Attach the pictures
I used dot glue adhesive to attach the pictures. This stuff is really sticky and wants to pull off with the backing when you try to remove it, so it was a little bit of a pain to put them on. But I don’t think those pictures will be lifting off anytime soon, which is good because we don’t use air conditioning much in the summer, so I was a little worried about humidity. Not anymore.
I think that if I could do it over, I would have played around with the placement a little more. When I was applying the glue dots, I had a good chunk of thinking-time and I spent some of it thinking that the heart kind of looked like the state of Ohio. Then the Hubs came in to look, and without me saying anything, he said it looked like Ohio.  We live in Ohio, so that’s probably not a bad thing, just not what I was going for. Just don’t tell Pip–she loves the heart shape!
**Update after I wrote up this post and then started editing pictures** I realized that some of the pictures I had on the outside edges of the collage (which were defining the outside shape) were really light on their edges–so they were not doing a good job of making the edges of the collage look like a heart. They blended in with the wall color instead. So I moved a couple of darker pictures to the outside edges and that helped somewhat with the Is-it-Ohio-or-is-it-a-heart problem! Keep that in mind when you are placing your own pictures.
I’ve used PureBond plywood for all of my plywood projects, so the scrap plywood I used for this project was all PureBond 🙂
