DIY Vintage Plate Wall

I love pretty dishes.

Vintage china plates and delicate crystal platters tend to call my name.

This seems to run in the family because so does my mother.

Her collection of vintage dishes far outweighs my own.

And I recently had a chance to help her with installing a plate wall, displaying her favorite vintage dishes, in her newly remodeled dining room.

I shared this plate wall a few weeks back on my Instagram, and it seemed to peak quite a bit of interest, so I thought I would share how we did this project.

Decorating with plates on the wall is an inexpensive, yet bold statement you can make in any room of your home. While they tend to be featured in kitchen and dining rooms, I have also seen plate walls as artwork above pianos and beds, in bathrooms or even down hallways.

They do sell suction based hooks that you can mount to the back of your plate in order to hang them properly without a gap on the wall. However, I went with a simple DIY method instead for our plate wall  involving hot glue, felt and a safety-pin. More on that later.

I first started with arranging how I wanted the plate wall to look on the wall.

The plates we used were all sentimental family dishes that had specific meaning to my mom.

After you’ve chosen which plates you want to feature, play around with the arrangement on a large table top or floor surface, moving around the different sizes until you’ve found something your eye likes.

There’s no rhyme or reason on how to do this, but one rule of thumb is to try to make sure you’ve got symmetry. If there’s a big heavy dish on the far top right, then try to anchor it with another of that same size along the bottom left.

You can really create an authentic and eclectic look using a specific color, design or pattern of dish.

And if you’re really stumped on a look, Pinterest has a TON of inspiration to pull from.

So how do you get these plates to actually stick to your wall without falling down and breaking?

Our method, as mentioned above, was a DIY using some very simple items found at home:

• Hot glue
• Felt – cut into small squares
• Safety Pins

If you have these 3 items, you can create a simple “hook” for your plate backs that will ensure they will safely stay put on your wall.

Start by flipping the plate over and finding its inner rim.

Place a large dollop of hot glue along the top of the center of this rim. Then place the safety-pin upside down into the hot glue with the “eye” of the pin pointing up, and cover it with another generous blob of hot glue and the small square of felt.

Hold this in position carefully – it is hot glue after all – until its had a few seconds to set.

Then, once the glue has completely dried, it is ready to hang on the wall.

We used simple small nails for each plate to hang on.

You can transfer your desired look from the surface you first laid out the design, plate by plate, onto the wall.

And what you’re left with is really a work of art…simple, yet stunning!