Antique Group Photo Grouping!

For my Friday Favorite this week, I wanted to share my new photo wall.  The middle, long photo is what inspired this arrangement.  It is a graduating class, with all the girls dressed in white and I love it.   After getting a good deal on it, from another dealer at the mall, about $30, I thought it would be fun to collect more, and display them together above the batten board wall in my family room.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Until I checked out ebay and found that long group photos from the turn of the last century usually sell for a hundred or two and more.  Rethinking my plan, I decided to have some small antique photo cards, that I found for less than $10 each at the antique mall, enlarged, as I have had good luck with doing that, because old photo originals have such good resolution.  I actually took them and had them color copied (to pick up the sepia tone) onto photo cardstock for just $1.50 each.  I then found old frames in my collection in the basement and spent some time framing them.   I even included this favorite photo of women dancing together in a stream that I got from Graphics Fairy, and which I have used several times.  Such a joyful photo.  Which brings me to one reason I love old group photos.  They ask so many questions, "Who are we?", "What is the occasion?", "Why am I smiling, while she looks angry?"  "Why are we holding up our dresses while we dance in a stream?"  They just capture my imagination.

But in the case of a couple of the pictures, I know who they are and what they are doing, because they are family pictures.  To the right is a picture of my mother (in the cap) with the other girls who also worked the switch board at the newspaper where she worked, she was 17 in this picture.

I also happened to have a photo of my father and his polo team in College.  Since my parents met when she was in high school and he was just out of college, I like to imagine that this is just how they looked when they met, the tall blond Norwegian whose mother was from the old country and the small brunette who had a Native American princess in her ancestral lines.  (Can you tell I love family history?) 

Thanks for coming along to see how my grand idea was humbled a bit, but actually happened.  I am super very happy with how it turned out and I am especially happy it didn't cost me $1,000.