HGTV's Erin Napier Shares Her Old-School Method For Home Inspiration

How do you organize all the home decor ideas that you come across on a daily basis? Scrolling on Instagram or even walking by a furniture store presents many opportunities for inspiration, so it's good to have a process for saving and collating all those ideas. In an Instagram post, HGTV's Erin Napier reminds us of the old-school technique of collage, as she shows her daughter making one with clippings from old Cottage Living magazines. Collage-making can be a fun thing to try out if you're designing a new home or redesigning your current one.

There are different ways to organize home inspiration ideas. You can take or save photos on your phone and store them in a folder, save pins on a Pinterest board, or save posts on Instagram to a collection. There are also more advanced online tools that can help you plan a space with realistic visuals; for instance, the IKEA Kreativ is great for planning your next home renovation. Collage making, however, has an old-school charm with unique perks.

Collages are made up of visuals that you like and want to reference later. All you have to do is cut out pictures and texts from magazines and books and stick them on a surface like a canvas, board, or cardstock paper. The manual aspect of a collage can be more appealing than similar digital options because you can organize the visuals in a more detailed way, placing them exactly where and how you want them.

Collage wall art is a clever way to repurpose old magazines around your home, and you can take that a step further by making the collage serve as a vision board. If you're working towards moving to a new place or buying a home, you can create a collage to depict how you would like it to look and what you want to see in it; it can be as general or as elaborate as you want. For instance, you can make a simple one to represent the entire space or go into more detail by making a collage for each room. We like this technique because it can help you visualize cohesive color palettes for your home, furniture placements, and other kinds of pairings without needing to have those things already.