My ‘Door to Nowhere’..

before and after, Decorating, House Renovation, interiors, wallpaper

As mentioned in the last post, the final item left to complete was my door to nowhere. This the odd doorway/architrave mid way up the top stairs. A nice, but quite bizarre period feature in the house (?!). You know that song ‘We’re on the road to nowhere’ by Talking Heads, it has now morphed into ‘There is my door to nowhere’, and I have been so obsessed with getting this area sorted that I just can’t stop singing it in my head….

The wallpaper I put in it a few years ago had faux books, and I was quite bored. I ordered some samples of wallpaper to see what I could replace it with. They were all extremely expensive, and actually when they appeared I didn’t like them. So I turned to my iPad and starting hunting with the hashtags #quirky. And this amazing paper appeared via the excellent site Iwantwallpaper… it is a great site and they have a really good collection of papers.

Coloured Version

Monochrome Version

It’s called Mad Dogs by Holden Décor and there is a monochrome or coloured version. I decided to go monochrome, as I can always add colour later if I want to with my trusty pencils. It arrived really quickly, was very reasonably priced (£15.99! Saved me a bomb!) and took literally a few minutes to hang. It does not stretch or sag like a lot of papers do when they are left to soak, so lining up was really easy to do.

So there are dogs & flamingoes in hats, boxing kangaroos, drunk toads and a giraffe smoking a pipe amongst other things. I love it!

Here it is in situ, and I think it suits the grey walls much better than the previous books paper. Due to the width of the Door to Nowhere I couldn’t help but have to cut into the frames on the vertical run, but I still love it….

What do you think? It could be a Marmite situation for this paper for most people – love or hate!

MODERN BOTANICAL DIY PRINTS

Decorating, DIY, Graphics, Paper Art

EASY DIY BOTANICAL PRINTS WITH A TWIST

This is a simple way to create your own botanical prints with a contemporary twist. This weekend I picked up two very nice simple black chunky frames on offer for 2 for £10 at Homebase, with mounts inside already cut to fit A4 prints. I then made the prints myself at home, using downloaded botanical and paper images, normal photocopier paper and a printer. I have seen examples like this on sale for a lot of money in smart home decor shops, galleries and on Etsy, but you can make them yourself which is far more satisfying and far cheaper.

HOW TO MAKE THEM:

Start off by finding large sized botanical prints on-line. There are lots of places to find them for free: The Graphics Fairy and Botanicus are great paces to browse, especially the latter for thousands of botanical themes. Download the picture you want to use, in Botanicus it comes as a large pdf of a botanical collection of the book’s plates, whereas at The Graphics Fairy is it just one image as a pdf or jpeg. You do not need to print them out, but the below are examples of ones to look for, they need strong colours and lines to show up in the finished piece.

Enclosed here is a ready to print dictionary piece of paper, (but you could use old sheet music cut to A4 size, or other old text paper you may have available). Print this out in colour onto a piece of A4 paper, and make it fit the whole page as much as possible on your printer by using the ‘scale to fit’ option..

vintage-dictionary-page-sister-definition-clip-art-dictionary-o3o9hh-clipart

When it is dry, reload this printed paper into the printer, and then print out the botanical flower of your choice straight onto it. You may need 2-3 runs to get your grade right for your own tastes, (and not to do it upside down which I am guilty of a lot!). You can tweak your grade in your photo browser directly if it is a jpeg, or if it is a pdf you will need to convert it to a large sized jpeg first.

Then frame up your print, and hey presto… done in a jiffy….

Have a go, it is really not that hard to do and the possibilities are endless for printing images. Just make sure they are dense in colour and line. You can even do a 3rd print run with text on to personalise it for someone.