Spoonflower Swimmers on Art Wall

This couple in a nicely updated 1939 home in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston has a blank wall in the back of their large walk-in closet.  They have a lot of colorful , modern art and wanted a backdrop for it that would be fun, but wouldn’t compete .

One of the gals is an administrator for the athletic department in a local school district – so this small print “ Swimmers “ design is just perfect.  In fact, the day I hung this, she was away at a swim meet in Austin ! 

Note that Spoonflower offers scores of designs under the “ Swimmers “ name, so be sure to check all of them, and all the colorways they come in, too. 

Detail

Spoonflower is a little different from most wallpaper companies, in that it’s material comes in individual panels, or sheets – which they call rolls .  Each of these is 24” wide, and then you choose the length you want, between 3’, 6’, 9’, and 12’.  Each roll comes nicely packaged in an individual thick plastic zip-lock bag . 
These ones are upside down, so I had to re-roll them so the pattern would be coming off the top of the roll . 

Here are some tips about hanging Spoonflower. 
First of all, I like their “ Pre-Pasted Smooth Removable “ option.  And it’s the only one I’ll work with.  Their “ Traditional Pebble “ is a heavy vinyl that requires special trimming , bubbles, and is better suited for commercial spaces.  And, the Peel & Stick – well, everyone ought to forget  that sad stuff.  Please read my link to the right about that material. 
In this photo, you can see that the white material is thin and translucent , allowing things underneath to show through, sort of like a shadow .  So I need to be careful to make my pencil marks and notes on the wall very lightly. 
Side note: Never write on the wall or paper with ink or marker or crayon or grease pencil – it will bleed through the wallpaper .

This is a pre-pasted material , meaning that a thin layer of paste is already applied to the back.  To activate the paste , all you need to do is dip it in water , run it through a water tray , or spritz the back with a squirt bottle (uneven and kills your wrist) .  Their paste is quite adequate.  But I do like to have a little extra assurance, so I will roll on a little of my Roman 780 wallpaper paste onto the back. 

Then I take a sponge and drip clean water from a bucket onto the back of the paper .  Next I use a paint roller to spread the mixture of water and paste around the back .  This both activates the pre-paste, and also spreads around a little extra adhesive . 

Next, the paper gets folded pasted-side-to-pasted-side ( called booking ), then rolled or folded loosely.  I like to dip the ends of the rolled strip into a bucket of water – just 1/8” or so, to prevent them from drying out while booking.  Then the strip is placed in a plastic trash bag to prevent it from drying out during the booking period – a few minutes.  I use this time to paste and book my next strip . 

Spoonflower Pre-Pasted Smooth is a little different from most papers, because it’s designed to be overlapped at the seams.  Here I am lining up a seam.  This overlap does show as a ½” wide ridge along the entire length of each strip.  With busy patterns, it’s not very visible. 

Even with sparse designs like this one, once it’s dry and flat, you don’t notice.  Here’s the overlapped seam looking toward the light, which is leaving a very minor shadow.  And the overlap can be a good thing.  For starters, most wallpapers shrink a little when the paste dries, so you can end up with slight gaps at the seams.  Overlapping eliminates that.  Also, if a wall is unstable underneath, due to incompatible layers of paint , or dusty walls, or other, the tension of these drying strips of paper can cause the layers inside the wall to come apart / delaminate – and that will result in paper that comes away from the wall, taking layers of paint and etc. along with them.  This usually cannot be repaired or “ glued back down .”     (Do a Search here to learn more)  So overlapping the seams disperses the tension caused by the drying paper, and eliminates any seam from landing on the wall (because the sheets are overlapped ), so no popped seams .

Here is the seam looking away from the light.

Because Spoonflower Smooth Pre Pasted is thin paper and water-activated , it absorbs a lot of moisture from the water.  So the material can’t help but expand .  This can result in bubbles on the wall.  Also, when air pockets develop, there is nowhere for the air to escape, so, again, bubbles and blisters. 

If there are huge bubbles, it may be worth taking a brush or plastic smoother and chasing them out.  Or using a pin or razor blade to poke tiny holes to let the air out. 

But, really, if you can just relax and let nature take its course, as the paper dries, these bubbles will dry flat and disappear.  Trust me. 

Another thing that can happen is wrinkles .  These tend to form in the same place on every strip , and coordinate with how the paper was booked and rolled after pasting . 

The worst of these can be chased out with a plastic smoother.  But there are dangers to over-using the smoother tools.  Doing so can stretch the wallpaper and cause it to warp, which means the pattern might not match up perfectly on the next strip.  Or it might cause wrinkles that can’t be brushed out.  Again – if you can just sit tight and let the paper dry naturally, the creases and folds will disappear. 

I did some experimenting and found that booking and then rolling the strip up like a newspaper resulted in more wrinkles.

It worked better to paste, book, and then fold gently and loosely. 

Then into the plastic bag to sit for a few minutes .

Spoonflower PrePasted Removeable Smooth .  I like this stuff. 
Removeable means that it’s designed to strip off the wall easily and with no/minimal damage to your wall when you redecorate down the road. 
I suspect this is made by York , as it’s very similar to their SureStrip line .  Good stuff. 

The order comes with a mock-up of the strips / rolls you’ve purchased.

Install instructions

Promo info from Spoonflower .

Activating Adhesive on Pre-Pasted Mural Wallpaper

Mural panels standing on edge are cut, sequenced, staged, and ready to be pasted.
The panel lying on the floor will be my last strip, and will need to be measured and trimmed narrower before it’s ready to be pasted or hung.

I use several different methods to paste pre-pasted wallpaper, and you can do a Search here to read more.
But for today, I’m using the tried-and-true historic method of running the strip quickly through a water tray .
At the top of the photo, several strips have already been submerged and pulled through the water, then folded pasted-side-to-pasted-side. This is called booking .
Booking allows the adhesive on the back of the wallpaper to absorb the water and become activated. And it allows the wallpaper substrate to absorb moisture, expand, and then contract a little.
This method can sometimes get the material a little too wet, which can lead to over-expansion and then bubbles on the wall. That’s why I’ve placed the booked strips at a slant and over the bucket – so excess water can drain off.
Usually I paste and book one strip and then paste and book the next strip. While I’m hanging one, the second one is booking and waiting its turn to be hung. But with this water tray method and certain brands of pre-pasted material, such as Anewall , York , or Sure Strip , the paper sometimes gets so wet that it needs more time to dry before attempting to hang. So I’m pasting more strips at a time, so they can be drying out a bit while I hang the first strips.
There’s a bit of a risk to this, which is the potential for the paper to over-expand as it sits wet waiting to be hung. Then once it’s on the wall and starts to dry, it can shrink. All wallpaper shrinks when it dries. But if it has expanded too much, then when it dries and shrinks, you can be left with small gaps at the seams. Again, gaps are common with all wallpapers (most all), but can be exaggerated when dealing with over-saturated pre-pasted material as it shrinks.
Back to the method … You see the water tray, filled 3/4 full with clean water. I’ve set it on towels, which are in turn set on top of a thick plastic clear shower curtain. And that’s on top of my usual dropcloths, which are absorbent on the top (blue) side and water-proof on the underside. All this keeps any splashed water from getting onto the clients’ floors.
I also sometimes set the water tray in a bathtub, with towels set over the edge of the tub and on the floor.

Paint Drip Preventer

I love this Ultra Prime Pro 977 wallpaper primer by Roman. But a year or so ago, they changed manufacturers of their labels, and the new ones have a plasticized coating, which doesn’t absorb dripped paint, but allows it to run down the side of the can – and potentially onto my dropcloths or onto the homeowner’s floors or countertops. Can’t have that!

My solution is to wrap bands of cloth around the cans, that will collect and absorb any drips.

Head to the thrift store … for less than a dollar each, I’ve tried collars and sleeves from T-shirts. But what fits best and absorbs the most – shhhh! Don’t tell anyone … these are the waistbands from baby underpants!

Warping Wallpaper – Grasscloth

Well, this was a first for me. I can’t say that I remember having a grasscloth that stretched and warped out of shape this badly.

What’s odd is that, after I pasted and booked the wallpaper, it was perfectly lined up and flat. It was only after the paper had sat for the resting period, and then I unfolded it and took it to the wall, that it started warping out of shape.

My first strip laid against the wall nice and flat, but did not line up against my laser level’s red beam, moving to the left the farther down the wall the strip went. The subsequent strip to its right, naturally, would not butt up against the first strip. However, this second strip did line up against the laser plumb line, on both the right and left sides. So I left it on the wall.

But I had to tear off and discard that first strip.

I had problems with many of the strips. As you can see, there was major warping and wrinkling. I was unable to smooth out most of these warps.

Some of my colleagues have suggested that my trimmed edges were not straight. And I admit that I sense that my ($200!) straightedge is not true (perfectly straight). But a 1/8″ discrepancy over a 9′ drop should not result in wrinkles of this magnitude.

I think that the substrate that S&L is using is absorbing moisture from the paste unevenly, and thus creating the warps and twists.

The only way I could make this work was to do a double-cut (spliced seam). I smoothed the grasscloth onto the wall as best I could, even though both the right and left edges still presented wrinkles.

I carefully pulled away from the wall the left edge of the previous strip (having applied extra paste, to keep everything wet and “open”). Between that edge of the strip and the wall, I placed a “Boggess Strip,” (invented by a fellow WIA member) which is a thin strip of 2″ wide polyethelyne plastic, that will protect the wall from my razor blade.

Now hanging the next grasscloth strip, I then covered the underside of the right (wrinkled) edge with blue plastic tape (also invented by the same WIA genius member). This would keep paste off the surface of the strip I was overlapping it onto. Then I smoothed the paper onto the wall, allowing the right side of the strip to overlap on top of the previous strip, by 1.5″.

I worked out wrinkles as best as I could, but some insisted on remaining. I then took my EuniTool straightedge (invented by yet another WIA member), and used it as a guide, along with the red light line from my laser level, and a new, fresh razor blade, to cut a straight, plumb line between the edges of the two strips.

The grasscloth was thick, and I had to press really hard to cut through both layers. The Boggess strip prevented scoring into the wall. This is important, because an un-intact wall can delaminate under the stress of drying / shrinking wallpaper, and this can cause the seams to pop open.

Back to the double-cut. Once the cut was done, I removed the plastic Boggess strip from the wall, and the protective blue plastic tape from the edge of the grasscloth, as well as the two excess strips of paper that I had just cut off. (Do a Search here to see pics and read more about the double cut / splice process.)

I could then smooth the newly-cut edges of the two strips together.

All this takes a lot of time.

I still had more strips to hang – and each required the same procedure. You only have so much “open” time before a piece of wallpaper starts sticking to the wall and cannot be jacked around with anymore.

I had to jump to the left edge of the current strip I was working with, and add a Boggess strip behind it. And then I had to paste and book my next strip, and apply some blue tape to the area that would overlap the previous strip. Wait a few minutes for it to book and absorb the paste.

Then repeat the double cutting procedure used on the first strip.

All this caught me off guard, and it threw off my engineering of the wall and my planned width of the strips. It also took a lot more time … I spent 5 hours hanging just these 5 strips.

Bottom line – I got ‘er done … But I am definitely NOT going to recommend Serena & Lily grasscloth to future clients.

And I am VERY grateful to my WIA colleagues for inventing tools and gadgets that help with these tricky situations, which I’m glad I bought and had stashed in my van, and for sharing their knowledge and experiences so I knew what techniques I might try.