Olive Garden Inspired Dining Room Decor

We bought our house about a year ago now, and Im just now getting around to decorating the dining room! Its been so bare and boring for all this time! And I have had ideas for the decor for a long time. But making sure I had enough time and the right items is what had kept me putting it off! But its finally done.. and Im going to be showing it off one project at a time. :)

Here is Part 1 of Dining room decor!

I was inspired by Olive Garden! Yes.. every time I go there, I just love the look of the platters and plates on the wall.
A little back story:
I found and fell in love with a table cloth I found at walmart one day (many months back), I had to buy it.. the colors were perfect and so bright and I loved the pattern. When I went back a few days later, I saw they had matching plates and platters and trays all in the same patten! Well I just had to but them! LOL And I knew instantly these were the plates I wanted for the decor.

I also knew that I wanted to use them as picture frames, rather than just have them plain on the wall. Which still would have been nice.. but hey, Im a photographer.. any chance to put up more pictures of my beautiful "subjects" was gonna make me a happy mama! :)

Here is what I did:

I printed the pictures for my plates.. my 3 gorgeous kiddies, and on of me and the hubs, full photo paper sheet.
I used card stock paper.. put it under the plates and traced around the bottom to create a template, to use when cutting the pictures! Rather than have a sloppy pen mess on my pictures.. its on the card stock paper, and then I can actually see where I wanted to cut my pictures. :)
I used a paint brush to brush Mod Podge on the center of the plate.. then carefully layed a picture onto it. Smoothed it out, and made sure there were no air bubbles!

Then I used the paint brush again to seal the pictures with mod podge.

It dries nice and clear! Here is my 7 year old daughter Kiah (not like Kia the car, but sounds like K-eye-uh) People always seem to ask, in person, so if anyone in blogland was wondering also.. there ya go. :)

My 4 year old son Bruce Jr

And the baby! :) My 17 month old son, Zander.

After they were nice and dry, I simply used a hot glue gun to glue ribbon to the back, to hang them by.

I enlisted the help of the hubs, for precision hanging. :) hehe

Here he is with me. I used the platter for our picture.

And again.. all together. On the main wall of our dining room. :) It may not seem like much, but it really made the dining room stand out. Looks a lot better in person. And I love seeing those smiling faces!! :)

I will be linking up to all these wonderful linky parties!!