Baseball gallery wall...

Baseball gallery wall = DONE! Yay! :)

In laying out the pattern for the wall, I had a pretty good methodology. I started in the middle with the biggest piece that we wanted to be the main focus. From there, I put the other pictures in order of largest to smallest. I started with the largest, picked a place for it, then moved to the next. I tried to somewhat keep in mind things like not having too many horizontal [or vertical] frames in a row, the colors, etc. But the main thing I kept in mind was not to over think it, since I generally tend to be super planned out and symmetrical [which is not what we were going for].

As far as actually hanging the frames, I couldn't really decide on a good method.

I've read a bunch of places about using wrapping paper to make cut-outs of each frame to arrange on the wall first. But I also had read that the wrapping paper rolls up and is annoying. So, I thought I would use the random stack of yellow paper we have. Well, you can see how long that lasted before I got bored of doing that...

Then, I decided to just make pencil marks on the wall of where the edges and middle of the arrangement should be. That was definitely helpful but didn't really give the same effect as seeing something on the wall [teensy-tiny, little pencil dashes don't count as seeing something on the wall in my book]. So, I decided to use tape to mark out some key parts of the arrangement to make sure it looked right. It looks pretty random, but was helpful. After seeing it on the wall, I knew I wanted to move the arrangement up some from what I originally thought.

Then, I was almost ready to start actually hanging things on the wall. Again, I knew I wanted to start by hanging the big piece in the middle to anchor the arrangement. I numbered each piece to know which should go next, which was very helpful. The sides of my arrangement are in a line, so I numbered in a way that I would do those and then space the frames in the middle so that they would fit in between. It was probably especially helpful since I didn't have any real measuring going on. Sure, I knew I wanted some things three fingers apart, but I don't think that counts as real measuring. I actually think my lack of real measuring helped make it easier though, since then I wasn't worried about hanging things so they were exactly two inches apart or something like that.

Okay, enough babbling. Here's how it turned out - first, the view as you walk up the stairs...

Next, as you round the corner into the upstairs area...

And then, the view from in the rec room...

And just for fun [and because I'm very proud of it :)], here is the before and after...