I saw this wallpaper in a powder room while taking the Houston Heights Home Tour last Sunday . This pattern was wildly popular about 10 years ago. Imagine squeezing under that console sink with metal legs to place the wallpaper under there.
Another shot, showing a little more of the fir down / soffit over the sink . According to Wikipedia , the designer, Hunt Slonem , started developing his obsession with all things bunny in the early 1980’s . He’s produced lots of different incarnations, and they’ve been used in wallpaper , fabric , artwork , kitchenware , decorative items , and everything in between.
Such a fun pattern. “And they breed like – rabbits!” This wallpaper is notoriously difficult to install . More on that in a future post.
Rifle Paper is made by York, and York is one of my favorite brands. But, I’ve gotta be honest, you can pretty much count on printing defects with this company. Do a search here for examples in previous posts. Here we’re looking at a pattern mis-match at the seams . Very maddening is that often it will match at the top of the strip, but fall out as you move down the wall. That’s why we aim to match the pattern at eye level, and then let it get out of whack moving up and moving down the seam , where it’s less noticeable . A lot of the problem is that their trimming rollers get wobbly , and don’t cut the paper perfectly at the edges . They can start trimming at a slight angle . This will grow as the trimmers continue up the length of what they’ve printed …. This particular paper comes in 27′ long double roll bolts . Let’s say they print 100 of those at a time (one Run or Batch ). That comes out to 2700′ and that’s about half a mile … If the trimmers are off kilter by even 1/64″, or even 1/128″ , by the time they trim a half a mile, you know that the pattern is not going to be where it’s supposed to be at the edge of the wallpaper . If you look closely at this photo, particularly the small leaves near the center of the picture , you can see that the tip of one of the leaves is seen at both the left and again at the right side of the seam . In other words, the paperhanger / installer didn’t make a mistake matching the pattern … The factory’s trimmers got out of square or off-target or however you want to describe it. Or … maybe the printing press and paper weren’t perfectly aligned , so the pattern got placed on the paper at a very slight angle .
On this seam, the pattern matched perfectly at the top of the wall, but got off as it moved down the wall.
Again, study this and you’ll see that some of the pattern that’s supposed to be on the right of the seam is also on the left. So the pattern is repeating itself because the factory either trimmed incorrectly, or …. Another scenario is that the printer got the image onto the paper at a slight angle. This pattern is somewhat busy, so, from a distance, you’re not going to notice these mis-matches too much. But, still, gee,,, for the money homeowners spend on their decorating project, don’t you think the product should perform better than this? I found that some rolls matched better than others. So, before I started, I laid the rolls out next to each other, trying to find those that matched each other best. Of course, this took a lot of time, and is inexact, at best, because things look a lot different rolled out on the floor or your work table then they do on the wall . Another guideline is to use strips from the same bolt next to each other. That way, as the mis-trimming / mis-printing progresses as it runs through the Batch, the strips that were printed in sequence will (supposedly) match up better to each other. In this powder room , I did discard one strip and start over, due to the mis-match was in a prominent place (near the vanity / mirror ). Most of the other strips matched acceptably. There was one strip that didn’t match all that great, but it was behind the door , plus I didn’t have a lot of extra paper to keep cutting up, so I let it go. From a few feet away, you didn’t notice it very much.
The pattern is called Canopy and is by Rifle Paper , a very popular line of wallpaper and other decorative items . installer houston
When I arrived at work today to finish this large powder room (see previous post), this cracked me up. The homeowner, who is launching a career in interior design, couldn’t resist bringing in a few decorative items!
The Wallpaper Lady's Blog 