Plate Wall - My Way

*Be sure to see the update at the bottom of this post.

Which is to say the hard way. Ugh! This gave me so many problems. But, in the end, I won!!! And I think it was worth it.

So, I blog stalk. A lot. I'm a faithful reader of blogs like The Nesting Place and Cottage Instincts and Our Suburban Cottage and about a dozen other blogs of women who have beautiful taste and beautiful homes in the current cottage and coastal flavors. And I love them all. They really are so beautiful. Places I would LOVE to visit. I'd spend hours just soaking up all the creative touches they've added to their homes.
But I couldn't live there. All that white and neutral would get to me after about a week. And I'd be itching to paint something. Probably Purple!!! It's *my* turquoise you know.
I don't know if there's a name for my style. I'm not sure if I even know what it is yet.
So I stalk read and gather ideas and see if they can fit into our house in a way I'd want to live with every day.
One of the things that many of the blogs I read have in common is a plate wall. They're usually all white. Maybe with a robin's egg/aqua/turqouise plate or two thrown in. And they look GREAT. Gorgeous!
But my plate wall had to be more ... me.
I already had many of the plates I needed and some hangers bought a long time ago at various thrift stores. I just needed to add some more plates to make the grouping big enough for the large blank wall in the kitchen.
That wasn't too hard.
After I had all the plates gathered I had to figure out how to hang them up. The most obvious answer was these wire plate hangers. Seemed like a no brainer.

Not so fast. I put the hangers on and was moving the plates around on the counter to find just the right arrangement when, BEFORE I even tried to hang the first plate, SNAP!!! 

First one hanger snapped right off, then another shot across the room.

Thankfully no eyes were put out!

I lost ALL faith in the wire hangers and decided to go a different route that I had read about on various blogs.

The mystical, magical Command Strips! I've never used them before. But people rave about them. So I thought they might work for me.

Not. at. all. ugh! I don't know if my plates are super weird or what, but there was no way the strips could make contact with the bottom of the plate AND the wall too. Grr!!!

So I had a little temper tantrum and ate a rice krispy treat with mini M&M's. Sometimes that helps.

Then Roger and I wandered around Lowe's looking for a different solution.

I spotted these D rings...

And we decided to see if we could glue them on the back of the plates with Gorilla Glue. According to the glue bottle label it should work.
So we glued them and "clamped" them with painter's tape.

We waited an hour. Which was hard for me. I had already been waiting about a week to get these dang things hung up on the wall. 

We removed the tape.

And guess what?

It worked!

Tah dah!!!!

My very own plate wall. 

I love it!

It wasn't as easy as the pros I mentioned earlier made it seem.

And it has a flavor unlike theirs.

But very much like ours. 

It's perfect for where we live. :)

*UPDATED 9/1!
The gorilla glue gave up late one evening and resulted in the loudest crash you ever want to hear at ten pm and this...

This isn't working for me at all!

I only lost two plates. I removed the other two to spare them the same fate.

I'm off today to find the plate hangers mentioned in the comments.

Joining some linky parties...