Squared-Off Photo Wall

Since moving over Memorial Day, The Boy and I have been spending as much time as possible settling into the new place. This recently meant a photo wall full of tricky math (that's why The Boy is involved). I helped as much as I could by assembling the frames, and sketching out how the wall should look.

I started by drawing, to scale (one square = one inch), the outer dimensions of the squared-off rectangle on some graph paper. I also drew the frames to scale and cut them into pieces. I drew mock frames of many different sizes and then played around with placement to get all the frames to fit within the borders that I had determined would fit best on the wall.

It helped me with final placement to differentiate which frames had heavy borders by sketching the frame borders out more or less to scale as well. After a long time of playing around with the model, I finally figured out placement that would work, and then I ordered the frames.

Next I taped the mock frames that made the final cut to the top side of my envisioned rectangle.

Then down the left side of the rectangle.

Then across the bottom.

Then, spiraled the rest of the frames up the right side and through the middle.

The order that I taped the model together (top, left, bottom, right, middle) is the same way that we installed the frames as well--which helped us keep the edges square. When the frames came, I laid them out on the floor according to the model, and we ended up making a few minor tweaks, which is why the picture of the final model doesn't exactly look like the actual photo wall.

Thanks to W's mathematical magic, everything came together. I love how the frames square up around the edges, but have random spacing within the interior of the rectangle...looks kind of like a quilt!

Frames are from Aaron Brothers, Dryads Dancing and Room & Board.