Warps and Wrinkles in a Non-Woven Material

Re yesterday’s install / post, one of the benefits of the newish non-woven wallpaper material is that it is dimensioally-stable, meaning that it will not expand when it gets wet with paste, and will not shrink or gap at the seams when it dries. So there is no need to paste the material, fold and book it, and wait several minutes before hanging. This characteristic allows you the option of hanging it by the paste-the-wall method.

This material by Wallmur, though, DID expand, as you can see by the wrinkles and bubbles in the photo. I was able to get the top area into place with a bit of wrangling. But the bottom half had more time to get wet with paste, and so swelled up more. Some of the wrinkles I could not get out.

My solution for that was to slice the paper vertically, along a flower stem and other vertical elements in the design. Then I smoothed out the wrinkles and overlapped the excess paper. In the finished photo, the area is to the left of the white daisy in the lower center of the mural. It is not noticeable. BUT … had this happened in the upper sky area, the slit and overlap might have been visible.

Most non-wovens contain a high fiberglass content. But I think this manufacturer used a lot of paper in his mix, which absorbed moisture and caused the material to swell.

If I had known this ahead of time, I could have done few things to mitigate the expansion. For one the paper could have been pasted on the back, instead of pasting the wall. Or, the back could have been very lightly dampened with a sponge or spray mister, and then allowed to sit for a few minutes. This moisture would have allowed the material to expand before the paper got to the wet paste on the wall.

1-Year Old Finally Gets Her Room Decorated

This family has been wrapped up in building a new home, moving in, and other hectic family tasks for many months. In the midst of that, the youngest member arrived – but there was never a chance to get her room all dolled up. Today that changed!

This is a 4-panel mural by Walmur. In one photo, you see how I have laid the panels out on the floor, to check the pattern match, sequence, measurements, and, because the mural is a foot+ too high for the wall, to determine which areas to cut off. Because there wasn’t much going on at the top other than plain sky, but a lot more interesting elements along the bottom, I took about 12″ off the top, and only about 1.5″ off the bottom. To preserve the dragonfly on the right edge, I placed the mural so that the excess 5″ width was trimmed off the left side.

The panels were 39″ wide, which was a bit difficult for short stuff me to handle. It was a non-woven material, and I hung it using the paste-the-wall method. I was not real crazy about the quality of this product (see tomorrow’s post). But once it was up on the wall, it looks great.

The room is all ready for the little girl to move into.