Walls and Wallpaper Part One

 This might depend on style and country but for me I'm going to talk about what I can get in UK.

When looking through books and magazines while in some respects style and what's 'in' is the same but in other ways we are poles apart dictated by population and land size. Places like China or Japan the homes are in general very small  so a clean minimal look is pretty much the only way to go.

In Europe, homes in the most part are middle sized and if you are careful you can get away with most styles. 

For the bigger countries with less population per square mile homes are on the most part larger and you can do more but need to be careful that your rooms do not end up bitty or disjointed. 

When designing for your dioramas these same things need to be thought about before you start.

Modern,Victorian, themed, large or small etc?

Will you be adding door or windows or a ceiling?

What colours are you going for?

Paint, wallpaper, gift wrap, moldings, built in's or what do you plan or doing with the walls?

Are you building a foldaway room and a fixed structure?

And the big one... what space do you have?

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Most people use foam board to build with. This is easy to cut, light weight and came in many sizes and thickness. 3mm, 5mm and 10mm in UK.

To fix wallpaper etc to the walls you need either a thick wallpaper paste (boarder paste) or something like Elmer's purple glue sticks (no idea why the purple works better than the others but it dose! This purple glue is also good as you can see what you are doing and it drys clear. If you are using wallpaper paste you will need to weigh down the board after papering or it will warp if you are fixing it to foam board.

Other boards are MDF or hardboard, you can use cardboard but that's never worked out very well for me.

If you are looking to cover a small space temporally you could use magnets, glue dots or poster putty.

I'm just starting to get back into my dioramas after being MIA for a couple of years and I'm also looking to decorate my home as well!

Now wallpapers, I get most of mine free from DIY stores or buy samples on line. Some of the on line sample are a bit small but there are ways around this. Most samples are no more than £1 or £2. If you are getting free samples then get as big a sample as you can. This goes for in real life too. As you would need a large enough piece to be able to see how light and other furnishings would work with it in your home.

I have been collecting wallpaper for about 20 years and I have a LOT. I'm talking 100's. 

I do on occasion throw out a few but I keep most. I decided it might be an idea to take photos of what I have as a reminder and to make it easier when looking for a background. I have wallpaper that I plan on using in my permanent dioramas but also a lot I have fixed to foam board just to pull out for backdrops. I started with sorting my loose paper into bins.

And then I looked at what I had already fixed to boards. 

The rest of this post is just showing photos of wallpapers so unless you (like me) just looking at different papers and styles you might want to stop reading now. 

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For those of you still looking please remember what I said I do have 100's and will most likely go onto a second post (or more). I have taken two photos of each paper, one with a doll for scale.

 

 

 

Loved the design below so much I have just purchased it for my living room

 

 

 

The picture below is a classic example of what not to do. You can not use foam board twice. Well, not the board I use anyway! You end up with crinkles and bubbles that can not be removed.

More in part TWO