60th Wedding Anniversary Photo Collage

More from the adventures of Crafty Kelly – this time she takes on Martha Stewart!

In July 2011, my maternal Grandparents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. A feat very few accomplish. To celebrate, my family held a party in their honor in my hometown of Milton, Florida. Family came in from as far away as Washington for this big event and we were excited to have many local friends attend. It was wonderful to hear stories of my grandparents (and even a few of me as a child!).

We held the celebration in a local community center and I wanted to do something that was memorable and could serve as a conversation piece. I was flipping through my Martha Stewart magazine one day and saw inspiration similar to this (the particular one was a Giant 50 made with black and white photos): 

If you remember from my Pizza Bites post, I’m not that crafty but in my head this seemed like an easy project.

Remember these words.

So, I reached out to my aunts, uncles, cousins and Facebook to gather the pictures I needed. I ended up receiving way more pictures than I needed, but I used the extras to create an updated family scrapbook for my grandparents via Snapfish 🙂

The pictures I chose for this giant 60 were ones that had multiple people in them (ideally siblings, cousins, families). I wanted to express how much of an impact two people made when they fell in love in high school. Once I chose my pictures, I went through the task of scanning each photo, cropping and converting to black and white. Then I printed the pictures at a local retail store.

I live in Virginia and was flying down for approximately 36 hours to attend this celebration, so I carried the pictures in my bag. I arrived in Florida on Saturday, late nonetheless, on a humid, rainy afternoon (the party was on Sunday). In my mind I didn’t think this giant 60 would take long to put together. That evening, my aunt suggested we work on assembling it as a “Cousin Bonding Event.”

This might be a good place to mention that I am super Type A.

We gathered in the dining room and started to put this together. Unfortunately, a small dining room table and about 15 adults made this blog writer very cranky, very fast. I imagined putting this together kind of free hand, taping the photos to one another and placing on the wall at the community center. However it wasn’t quite working out and difficult to envision on the dark wood table (this was more of an issue when we went to do the 6). Plus there were lots of opinions flying around in regards to the best way to do this and transport it to the community center. Here is a photo of the progress at this point: 

Soon, someone mentioned placing these photos on poster board. I will admit that I wasn’t thrilled with this idea but after two hours and little progress I was up for anything.

So I headed out to the local grocery store to pick up some poster board and adhesive strips. When I got back to the house, we laid the photos out on the poster board and it worked a lot better. The poster board also made it easier to transport the giant 60.

If we had access to the community center sooner, I think we could have just taped the photos directly on the wall without the need for the poster board, but in light of the circumstances, this was a better decision. We were able to knock the 0 out fairly quickly that night (there were also 13 less voices) 🙂 The next morning I woke up super early and knocked out the 6 with my mom before too many people arrived.

I would estimate that I needed approximately 130 photos for this size project. 

Unfortunately my entire time there, it did nothing but rain. So, we used trash bags to transport the giant 60 to the community center. Fortunately this worked and it stay dried. I immediately went to hang this on the wall and after using the super adhesive strips, we were able to get this to hang without falling. Here is the finished product. 

Fortunately people were able to discern that this said 60 and not “Go” and it turned out to be a great conversation piece. I was pretty proud of myself. The bonus of this whole project was that I was able to get a lot of pictures of my family members that I did not have – even some of me and my parents and brother! 

I hope you can try this out at your next event – anniversary or even a birthday! I think it would be great for a kids birthday to see how they have grown. 🙂

–Kelly

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