Photographs and Memories

Okay everybody, I know what song is running through your head right now, so I'll set things up and you can have it playing in the background while you read the rest of the post...

My husband and I are both at that age where our parents are moving out of their homes and into the next stage of their lives.

This means that during our trips east to visit them we bring home stuff. Stuff from our childhoods. Stuff full of memories.

Sometimes it's easy to find new homes for the stuff.

The rocking horse my dad made as a replica of the one from my grandmother's childhood sits on a shelf above our stairway, along with a picture of my grandfather from the same era.

The calendar Uncle Tom made for my in-laws - and that sat on their kitchen window sill for close to thirty years - now sits on our kitchen shelf.

But then there are these....

Some of these were my mother-in-law's, and some came from my mother-in-law's mother-in-law when she closed up her house. All of them had been preserved in albums - and sat on the top shelf of the living room closet. My husband and his siblings had never seen most of them.

So we brought them home.

The first thing I did was to scan them into my computer, and then email copies to my husband's siblings so we could all enjoy them.

But we didn't want them to spend the next who-knows-how-many-years on the top shelf of our closet. Besides, we had this huge, empty wall. :)

So I got this idea....

I love the look of vintage photo albums. You know, the ones with black paper and those little black photo corners to paste the photos to the paper?

I wanted to reproduce that look. And that meant a trip to Hobby Lobby! We found matching picture frames in both 8x10 and 5x7 sizes with UV protective glass. And we found black acid free paper in the scrap-booking section.

(By the way, my husband is very glad I never took up scrap-booking. I could get lost in that section!)

The only things I didn't find at Hobby Lobby were the photo corners. So these came from Amazon:

From there, the hard part was deciding which pictures should go together - how in the world should we group them?

We ended up putting couples together - from babyhood and childhood. Wedding snapshots with honeymoon pics. The family dog with photos of the children. Our aunts and uncles. Our siblings. Our parents. We used photos from my mother-in-law, plus ones I already had from my family.

And some pictures we kept in their original frames. This picture of my husband's grandmother and her sister from when they were "in service" at the beginning of the 20th century has been in this frame as long as my husband can remember. Who are we to separate them?

And some we framed alone. This one of my husband's grandfather has always been a favorite of both of us. It sits on my blue shelf for now....

And here's the finished product:

Or maybe it isn't finished. There's still wall space left, and we have plenty of old photos....

How do you display your favorite family memories?