When I set up our baby’s nursery, I wanted to include art at her eye level. I love the Montessori philosophy of making a nursery suited to the baby, instead of the adult. I’d included a few kid-friendly art pieces at my height, but I also wanted her to have things to see when she crawled and explored around the room.
The idea snowballed, as my ideas often do, to a baby art gallery. Specifically, my inspiration was the Mauritshuis in Den Haag, with ornate gold frames galore.
I recently shared a video of the baby art gallery on Instagram and it really took off, so I wanted to claim the idea before some Amazon dropshipper steals it take a moment to show you how I made the baby gallery wall, and include a few tips to make it baby safe.
How to make a baby gallery wall
In a sense, this is the simplest possible idea. I just bought a few ornate gold mini frames online, filled them with some art I made myself, and hung them on the wall. But! There’s a few safety considerations I took into account that I’d like to share.
Adhere the art firmly to the wall!
It goes without saying that your baby will test the limits of anything you put in their nursery, including whether they can climb up the art you put there, rip it off the wall, and eat it. I knew picture hooks and nails would become a liability as soon as our daughter learned to crawl, so I used heavy-duty command tape to adhere the frames fully to the wall (specifically, I used this tape).
It’s really heavy-duty (the baby has pulled herself up on it successfully) so removing it will be a problem for future Sara. Keep that in mind in choosing how you do this!
Make your baby gallery wall safe: remove the glass!
Even though I made the frames next to impossible to rip off the wall, with a little baby you want to account for all possibilities. So, just in case, I removed the glass from all the frames. My thought was that if she did rip the paintings down, I didn’t want the glass to shatter and hurt her. Initially I planned to get acrylic, but in the end that was too complicated to arrange for a round frame, so I just laminated the prints.
Having fun with it: choosing frames and prints
I chose this particular set of frames. However, in recent months it’s become a popular DIY to make frame magnets for the fridge, so you can now actually buy frames without glass or a backing. I would probably do that now if I had to do it over.
For prints, I illustrated the prints myself to make them personal to our daughter. That said, I know not everyone loves drawing and sometimes you see a DIY online that’s just too cute to pass up. For that reason, I’ve made them available to download for free. Enjoy!
