 |
| Living Room at Casa Peaches |
A few folks inquired about the book pages in the background of my photographs. I never mentioned it before because I put it up long before the blog began…but since y’all asked….
It was really very easy. Cheap too. AND apartment-dweller-friendly (read: it doesn’t damage the wall. Wahoo!)
If you come to my tiny place, you will see a lot of things, not just the one wall, covered in old book pages. It’s kind of my thing. Not like I invented it, I just like to use it everywhere. I love the visual texture it creates especially when used in mass. It’s like a neutral.
Yes, I said neutral.
Neutral means beige and gray and cream and navy blue, to some people…to others, like me, neutral means old books, brown craft paper, black and white stripes and Kermit the Frog green.
But that’s just me.
It might be a little heavy handed for some folks but I like it just fine. It creates a great textural base layer to display all kinds of other stuff. It’s also the one wall in my home that gets flooded with natural light every morning, so you will see it in my photographs a lot.
 |
| Hmmm…what do these projects have in common? |
It’s like an apartment-friendly alternative to wallpaper. Just use a low-adhesive tape, like painters tape or removable scrapbooking tape. This wall has been up for over a year now and is doing just great. There was an especially humid stretch in the summer when I would find a page or two falling down every week, but big whoop! A little extra tape patched it up just fine.
If you choose to do this, the one thing you will need to be careful about is choosing the book. It needs to be big. It needs to be interesting. It needs to be an author you enjoy.
See, everyone who sees this wall is going to ask you “what book is this?” and it would be really embarrassing if you had to tell them it was some crumby thing you got at an airport concession stand. The book I chose was a three part volume: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island.
Suppose I could have chosen something much more high-brow, but LM Montgomery is my childhood favorite. Plus, she is one of those authors who writes in a way that each sentence stands on it’s own –you can look at any page on this wall and find a wonderful passage. It’s a constant source of comfort and inspiration. I love it to pieces.
One day I will leave this apartment and I’m pretty sure I will shed a tear when it comes time to take down this wall. Maybe the new tenants will be Anne with an E fans too and I can leave it up. Fingers crossed!
If you aren’t the literary type, there are all kinds of things you could thatch. What about yellow pages? Or sheet music? Or newsprint? (Anthropologie catalogue always does a lot of neato stuff with newsprint)….What about cookbooks? Wouldn’t it be cool to see a whole formal dining room covered in pages from 5 or 6 different cookbooks? They would all come together is different shades of cream and different styles of font….Oooo, I could just swoon. Someone do this and send me a picture!
 |
| The trick is to start with the edges, then work from the bottom up. |
Must give credit where credit due: First time I saw a thatched paper wall was in the hallway outside Mrs. B’s art room. For a while in college, I toyed with the idea of being an art teacher and was lucky enough to serve as her aide for a semester. Things went in a different direction for me, but I learned an awful lot from Mrs. B, including the concept of layering children’s art work. If you have enough space to hang your kid’s art on it’s won with lots of space around, that’s great. But if you are a Chicago Public School teacher with 250 kids, white space isn’t really an option.
To address the problem and make sure every child could point to their work and be proud, Mrs. B took to layering their work like thatched shingles. The end result was a hallway filled with a riot of color and texture. The pieces would gradually change over the course of the year, but the overall feeling of joyful excitement never changed. Most important, the kids loved it 🙂
Thanks Mrs. B!