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 .

A Classic “Necessary Room” Paper

OK, so sometimes you need to spend a little time in the “necessary room.” And what better way to pass the time than by reading a newspaper?

Patterns like this hung in bathrooms have been a running joke for decades. But still fun!

What’s cool is that this beautifully renovated home in the historic Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston dates to 1910, and the “newspaper” design is pretty period-correct to the era of the home.

There are notes about Prohibition, Anheuser Busch, sewing machines, the lowest price grocery store, vehicle repairs, and all sorts of goods and services – as well as the unique language used in back in that day.

This went in an under-the-stairs powder room. The wallpaper is in the Sure Strip line, in the Magnolia Home collection (Joanna Gaines), and is made by York. It is a very flexible non-woven material, and is pre-pasted. I like working with this material a lot. It will hold up for years, and is designed to strip off the wall easily when it’s time to redecorate.

The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design. She works mainly in the Heights area, and mostly on new builds or whole-house renovations.

Need a Little Reading Material in the Bathroom? ??

What fun wallpaper! This is very similar to grasscloth. But, instead of using natural grasses and reeds, this material is made of strips cut from magazine pages, rolled and folded into long narrow strips, and then sewed onto a paper backing. In some of the columns, you can actually read the words!

There is a similar product made from old newspapers – appropriately named “Yesterday’s News.”

I hung this in a powder room in a new, contemporary home in the Rice Military neighborhood of Houston. The homeowner, Cristin Wells, is an interior designer http://www.wellsdesignedhome.com/ who recently moved here from Chicago (not far from my hometown of St. Louis!), and brings her sophisticated playfulness here to the Bayou City.

This product is similar to grasscloth in that the seams are very visible. So I engineered the room to have seams fall evenly spaced on each wall, which we call balancing, and which gives a pleasing effect.

In addition, the material can be shaded, or paneled, which means there can be a noticeable color difference between strips, even if they come off the same bolt. In the third photo, you see how I have rolled the paper out on the floor, to check for shading / paneling, so the homeowner will be aware of this issue, and so I can plot how and where to use the various strips.

Indeed, before consulting with me, the homeowner initially purchased two bolts of paper; when I measured the space I told her that she needed five more. The additional bolts arrived in a different run. Run and batch and dye lot numbers are important – all bolts from the same run or batch were printed at the same time with the same batch of ink, and will generally be pretty much the same shade. Papers from a different run will be a slightly different shade, and will be very noticeable if placed next to one another on the same wall. This is true even with this recycled magazine page material – see the third photo – although instead of printing with ink, the ladies who manufacture this stuff (usually in China or somewhere in Asia) are grabbing handfuls of magazine pages. As you can see, color variations are still quite possible / probable.

In addition to the 10′ high ceilings, the room had a few features that made the install tricky. One was a deeper than usual vanity, which was difficult and somewhat dangerous to reach over to access the wall. This was also a “floating” vanity, which hung suspended on the wall with a short space underneath it that wanted to be covered with wallpaper. Contorting myself under a 30″ deep vanity into a 5″ high space to stick a couple of strips of paper to a rear wall that no one would ever see questioned my sense of reason – but I could not imagine leaving the wall unpapered, so I “got ‘er done!” Sorry, no photo.

Being a contemporary styled home, the window was recessed with a 1/2″ return,. This meant that I had to bring the paper to the edge of the window, and then wrap a mere 1/2″ around an outside corner. The paper was thick and didn’t want to make this turn, and, when it did, it didn’t want to stay stuck – it kept trying to lift up. Wetting the paper helped soften it so it was more agreeable to making these turns, and in some areas I also used a razor blade to make light horizontal slits in the material, right on the edge of the corner, to reduce tension and allow it to turn more easily. Sorry, no photo.

Speaking of making cuts … This stuff was thick and hard to cut, so it took a lot of pressure and several swipes to make many of the cuts, even with a brand new razor blade. When I trimmed the material horizontally at the ceiling and floor, the strings that held the folded magazine pages to the backing were cut also, and they came loose. That meant that there was nothing holding the folded magazine pages to the paper.

It turns out that each of those horizontal strips of folded magazine pages contained about 6 layers of paper, each folded accordion-style. Threads were sewn on to hold them to the backing. But once the threads were cut, the accordion-folded papers unfurled, spread apart, and pushed away from the backing. So when you looked at the ceiling or floor lines, you saw a puffy ridge running the width of the strip.

What I ended up doing was to go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor edges, gently pry apart the fanned layers, and use wallpaper paste to adhere them to one another. I had to get sufficient paste behind each of the six layers, for the entire 3′ width of each strip, press them back together, hold them until the adhesive tacked up – all without getting any paste on the paper or on the ceiling.

All of the above added a lot of time to this job, and I didn’t leave until 9:30 p.m. But the room looked great when I was finished. From its initial uninspired dull grey paint job to the colorful and quite unexpected recycled magazine pages covering the walls, this powder room has experienced a major transformation.

The wallpaper is by Seabrook, which has been purchased by York. Both are wonderful brands.