nesting and why blank walls scare me

The nesting process is usually pretty slow for me. If I move to a new space, I like to just live in it awhile before I decide what goes on the walls, and where.  I'm pretty fickle too; I've moved the couch around at least two different times, and I keep moving my indoor plants around too. But after four months of living here, some of these blank walls were turning into my nightmare. A girl just needs stuff to look at, ya know?

So right above my desk, I hung up some of my favorite photos, cards, and things that currently inspire me. I really love using twine and bulldog clips to hang stuff because I can always swap things out and hang different stuff. Cause I'm fickle, remember?

This is one of my favorite cards from Cracked Designs. So awesome.

Since the mister and I are slight hoarders when it comes to traveling, we had amassed an obscene amount of travel ticket stubs from our adventures in Europe. They were all just sitting in a box along with a bunch of coasters, maps, and travel brochures (cue flashback to every episode of Hoarders ever: Why am I keeping this stuff? What is wrong with my brain??), until I realized I better do something with this. So voilà! One free afternoon and several blank frames later, I had this. It's only a fraction of what we've collected, and I'm sure I'll add on to it, but for now, pretty dang good, no?

I call this the Buyer's-Remorse-Turned-Photo-Collage-Project. That big faux-wooden old-timey map wall hanging (actually there's two of them) was an impulse buy back in Spain, and it wasn't until our stuff arrived here in our new home that I realized, "Ugh. I hate this thing." So I decided to re-purpose one of them as a backdrop for a bunch of photos. Photos that were previously in a box, all sad and desperate to be displayed. All these photos are 35mm film photos from my Diana Mini camera. I'm thinking of using the other matching wall hanging for a bunch of Instagram prints.

I know, this doesn't really count as wall art, but I still wanted to share this. Up until today, all our books were stored in a bunch of cardboard boxes and sitting against this wall in our living room. The mister and I have plans of building custom wall shelves from floor to ceiling in this space, but that probably won't happen for a while. Which I'm fine with, but staring at ugly brown boxes was starting to get me down, so I took those bad boys out and started stacking them by color. Which makes my eyeballs so much happier.

Dear Current-And-Potential-Friends-Who-Borrow-My-Books, I can be pretttty stingy with my books. Just warning you now. If I haven't gotten a book back after a couple months, I start to worry. After six months, I start to question the solidity of our friendship. And if it's been a year or more, you're pretty much dead to me. Just kidding. Kinda.

This is in my bedroom, even though it's not quite finished. I need to mount the map to some cardboard or something, to make it a bit more sturdy. But this was super ridiculous easy. Just some vinyl adhesive letters and a ruler to line things up. God bless you, Michael's Arts and Crafts. I have missed you for three and a half years.