Fairy Lights and Photos Tutorial

Recently I have been loving creating a little space on my wall to display photos- the cute idea of using fairy lights I think is perfect for brightening up a room, and adds a personalised touch to bedrooms in particular, or at least to any area of the house where you would like to place these special keepsakes! During the experience of building up this wall design, I have collected some tips that I hope would be helpful to anyone who is considering creating a similar look, or possibly even inspire people to start this project!

I'm very happy with how it turned out and love the layout of photos!

To begin with, you would of course need to obtain everything needed, including a string of fairy lights, hooks or clips to attach them to a wall, and also a method of hanging photos from them. Personally, I started with deciding on which fairy lights were wanted, as I think the style and size of these determines what kind of other products you will need. This is where the shape they could form on a wall should be considered. Do you want a simple line of lights to travel across all four walls? Perhaps the ceiling space could be incorporated into it? Or how about a simple geometric shape on one wall? You can start to get creative with winding these photos around your space, or building up a unique shape; platforms such as Pinterest may come in handy for providing sources of inspiration here! For me, I thought an area where the lights form the gentle slopes of a shallow zig-zag would present the photos nicely in a collection on one wall; for this option, it would be useful to measure the length one section of the zig-zag would be and multiply this by the number of rows wanted to work out which length of lights you want to buy. It’s likely that the exact length you calculated isn’t available- in this case, I would advise you to go for the larger length, as you could create some excess in-between each clip to form small, drooping curves. 

As for assembling the lights on to the wall, if you have decided on a precise design, marking on the spots that you want the fairy lights to attach to would be useful, measuring the distance as precisely as you would like. I personally chose ‘Command Clips’ as I loved the fact that they were transparent, long-lasting and very easy to use! For my particular design, the string of lights has to move quite sharply around the corners of the zig-zag, so it can be useful to angle the clips slightly inwards so there is less stress on the wires as they bend around the corners.

Once the string of lights have been put into place, the next step involves gathering photos, or any other accessories you would like to add to your lights. I chose a bunch of personal favourites from years of memories, including family holidays, picturesque landscapes and snaps from special occasions, which I think makes the room feel so unique as it holds a huge collection of moments in one space, almost like having your own album spread out on to a wall!

Once printed to an appropriate size (I chose to make each one around 6cm in length), I attached them to the lights using cute little wooden pegs; I used ones by ‘Jin Zhu Daily Necessities’ from Amazon as they were very cheap for a plentiful amount! Finally, position your photos on the wall and make sure you are happy with the final product. Here is the outcome of mine, which I feel has worked successfully and is a pretty addition to my room!