the writing’s on the wall…

…finally!  About a year ago I bought a gorgeous illustrated children’s dictionary for a dollar or so; it was just so beautiful that I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving all its gorgeous illustrations tucked away behind the covers.  First I thought of framing a few of the pages, but then we visited a shop in Hobart which had sheet music all over the walls.  Perfect!

This is one of our bedroom walls upstairs.  It’s a big room, around 10m long and 5m wide, with plain white walls and grey carpet.  It could handle something a bit ‘out there’…but this actually hasn’t turned out to be as wild as I thought it might.  The soft, aged cream colour of the paper and the vibrant pops of gorgeous vintage illustrations are a perfect combination!

So how did we do it?  It was time consuming, messy, but really fun and pretty straight-forward!  Oh, but it does help to do this with another person!  It would be a lot trickier alone, so grab an unsuspecting friend and hand them a gloopy brush.

First I took a deep breath (“EEEEK!  I’m ripping up a BOOOOOK!!) and carefully tore the pages out of the book.  We measured the wall so that we knew how many pages to take out.  I didn’t need to use all the pages, but I wanted them to run in alphabetical order from the top left hand corner to the bottom right.  I just picked the pages with the best pictures.  We had the pages trimmed at a copy shop for less than $2 (just the torn side where I ripped it from the book), but you could easily trim them yourself if you had a heavy-duty paper cutter handy.

Then we scrubbed the wall, spread out some drop cloths on the carpet, and mixed up a packet of wallpaper paste.

Using an old paintbrush we pasted the wall and carefully smoothed each sheet on individually, starting in the bottom right corner with ‘Z’.  To make sure there were no bubbles of air under the paper, I used some old plastic cards to smooth them out really firmly, then rubbed the page with an old towel.  We lined up each row with a spirit level (Jasper took the above photos).  The pages overlapped slightly.

We did seven rows, working from the bottom of the wall, then did the top row so that we could be sure the top row would be a whole page.  We didn’t have to trim any of the pages, yay!!  Except to chop a few in half where the doors are.

So, one sticky day later we have a wallpapered wall!  I love it so much I’m wondering which wall downstairs we can work on next…