Determine your arrangement by laying your plates on the floor.

We love the look of plates hung on the wall. It's a great way to use a treasured but incomplete set of vintage dishes inherited from friends or family, to display your "only use once a year" dishes and free up cupboard space, or just show off a collection of single plates scrounged from thrift stores, antique stores and flea markets.

What You Need

Materials
Plates
Plate hangers (see our tips below on picking out the right kind!)
Picture hooks and nails
A hammer
A tape measure
Pencil or other marking device

Instructions

1. Determine your arrangement by laying your plates out on the floor. We borrowed Maxwell's idea of centering the display around a single plate, in this case, the red plate with the blue center design. The other plates radiate out from this central point. Other pointers: give slightly more weight to the left side of the display; visualize a flower as your guide, starting with a small plate that has some visual pull, then larger plates, moving outwards to a mixture of small and large plates. (Compare this preliminary arrangement with the final arrangement.)

2. Plate hangers are easily found at the hardware store. Get the ones that are designed so that the hook rests on the bottom edge of the plate (see picture 2) so that your plates will lay flat against the wall. The original hangers (picture 3) we bought had the hangers positioned at the rim of the plates which would have made the plates hang away from the wall at a funny angle. They come in various sizes and slip securely over your plates.

3. Use picture hooks to hang your plates.

4.Hang your central plate so that the center is approximately 57 inches from the floor, about eye level. Note: we cheated upwards because the plates were hung on the same wall as the flat screen, so we used the center of the screen as a guide. Additionally, this particular grouping is the beginning of a quickly growing collection, and our friends are tall so their "eye height" is significantly taller than ours!

5. We prefer to hang the plates so that their edges are touching; you may want to leave some space between them.

For more inspiration, see this post: Inspiration: Mismatched Plates

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(Images: Abby Stone)