A couple weeks ago I decided to clear out my spare room and fix it up for some guests who were coming into town. I donated my old furniture to a neighbor and brought in a couch, coffee table and TV stand. I loved how my new room looked, but the giant blank space above my couch was seriously taunting me. I thought about putting together a gallery wall, but those can look so cluttered and kitschy. I had just spent all this time decluttering-I didn't want to ruin that! I knew I wanted something that was simple and could stand on its own. And then I remembered engineer prints!
If you haven’t discovered engineer prints, listen up: you can upload a picture to Staples’ website and have it printed out on giant paper for like pennies. Like 800 pennies. The catch (there’s always a catch!) is that the print is not gallery-quality- the paper is thin, you can only get the picture in black-and-white and the overall quality is definitely imperfect. These are all sacrifices we make for cost and SIZE. The size of it! Wow.
My Aunt Cheli recently posted some old family photos on Facebook and I loved seeing where my mom and her family grew up. Out of all the pictures she posted, I freaked out over this picture of my Great-grandparents at their ranch:
Good times, indeed! I decided this was what I needed to pull my guest room together. I used my rudimentary Photoshop skills to darken the picture and then uploaded my version to Staples’ website. The next day, my print was ready for pickup. My print ended up being 27.25” x 38”. I also picked up a 30” x 40” foam board to “wrap” my print on.
Using a box cutter, I trimmed the board down to 26.75 x 37.5, leaving a .25 inch border for wrapping. I then flipped over the print, placed the foam board on top, and wrapped the print around the board like a present, being careful to keep the borders smooth, tight, and even. When I was happy with the margins, I used some scotch tape to liberally tape the sides down. To hang it up, I simply nailed two nails at the bottom of the print and one at the top so I could “wedge” the print into its slot on the wall.
***I say “I” but I really had the help of a very tall, very handsome man who is probably reading this now and saying “hey, I did that!” Okay, honestly, he did do most of this but only because he has actually wrapped canvas onto frames before and I needed to take notes. For science.
The finished look:
Some tips:
-Use a darker picture, if you can. I had tried this before with a much lighter picture and it just ended up looking washed out.
-Have fun! These aren't meant to last forever, so choose something that you love now. This site has two free printouts to choose from. Relax! Go nuts.
And some notes:
The two tutorials I went off of were from A Beautiful Mess and Happy Havens. The tutorials themselves are fine, but I had some issues with the pictures chosen. For A Beautiful Mess, my family just doesn't look like that! I don't have any cute, old timey photos of my family hanging out on their Midwestern vacations. I know that’s true for most of us, POC or not, but it just brought me back to a time when I was in 4th grade learning about the Gold Rush and asking what all the Mexican Americans were doing because I just could NOT relate to the curriculum at all. (If you're interested in learning about that, this is pretty cool.)
And for Happy Havens, I didn’t think it was right to display a picture of children snapped on a vacation in China. The author notes their poverty and talks about how the picture reminds her to be respectful of other cultures. I don't think this author had bad intentions, but this picture appropriates another culture and serves as a design element. What's troublesome is that this picture of these children now serves as a prop and decoration in her home, and when we turn things into props, we make them disposable. I was disappointed that no one pointed this out to the author.
