How to Make Your Living Room Look Pinteresting

SEE WHAT I DID THERE?! Anyway, I just used four tags on this post that have previously never been used on my blog EVER. Boy oh boy are you in for a treat.

When Sam and I first moved into our new place, we had some problems agreeing on what should be hung on the wall and where. This led to me scouring Tumblr and Pinterest for ideas and him vetoing all of them which, in turn, led to a big empty wall of nothingness behind our couch.

This feline anatomy scroll was my dream.
A dream that was crushed by a $90 price tag.

I was mostly obsessed with anatomical illustrations of animals, specifically cats and rabbits. I thought maybe if I hung them on the wall, they would serve as a warning to Shadow and House and curb their misbehavior. You'd be horrified to find out just how expensive prints that show animals guts or flower parts are. For small ones it can be anywhere from $30-$100+. I wanted to make a framed photo collage, but I didn't, and still don't, have 1k to spend on stamens and shit. If I did, do you think there'd be ads on this blog?

So I brainstormed and came up with a thrifty solution. You will need the following materials:

♥ This book
♥ An exacto knife
♥ Frames of various shapes and sizes (you can find these at thrift shops)
♥ Colored paper if you'd like to mat the pictures
♥ Hardware for hanging them up
♥ The patience of a saint
♥ Snacks, always snacks

I only had to buy the book because I'm a lucky duck (read: spoiled brat) and my dad has a home-staging business. This means he not only has a ton of thrifted frames just laying around, but he knows how to crop, cut, mat, mount, and frame the hell out of some pictures. You'll want to go through the whole book and pick which pictures you'd like to use. Much to my ecstatic surprise, they had a print of the above cat anatomy scroll. I peed a tiny bit.

Example of the smaller illustrations which can be
cropped to fit into eency weency frames.

Next, take the exacto knife and as precisely as possible, slice those pages out of the book. You'll want to slice as close to the binding as you can. I can't tell you how my dad managed to cut all of the pages out perfectly straight, but he did. I'm also glad he did because just the abstract thought of cutting up that book gave me psychosomatic chest pains. You'll want to crop some of the smaller ones so that they'll fit into tiny frames. You want to have a mix of large, medium, and small frames and the amount you should buy depends on how much space you need to fill. We used ten.

Next, start putting your pictures into the frames. For some of the larger frames, you'll need to use matting so that they don't look dopey. As previously mentioned, I didn't do any of this shit, so here's a tutorial I found with Google. When all of your pages are in their respective frames, find a space on the floor to lay them all out. You don't want to make them too symmetrical, but try to keep the spaces between each picture pretty even. Make the arrangement your own and mess with it for a while. When you find a mock-up that pleases you, start putting them on the wall one at a time (remembering where they were on the floor). To make your life easier, you can take a picture of them on the floor before you start hanging them up so that you can reference the picture throughout the hanging process. For the love of all that is holy, be careful to not start too far right or left so that the collage doesn't make it all the way across the wall and then you have to do it all over again and your boyfriend starts responding sarcastically to everything you say while he pulls nails out of the wall only to rehammer them in two feet from their original spot. HEED MY WARNING.

If you read and followed this vague, discombobulated tutorial, you should end up with something like this:

And my apartment is that much closer to becoming a hipster apothecary.
Sorry for the phone-quality pictures but also, deal with it?

Edited to add: my friend is an amazing and talented artist who is an experienced scientific illustrator. So, if you'd like to support her by purchasing some of her work instead of using that book, that'd be awesome too!