Choosing Fabrics for Wall Hangings

Choosing Fabrics for Wall Hangings - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Wall hangings are a great, easy way to freshen up a room. It is farily inexpensive, less than original art. You do not need very much fabric a lot of times, the cotton prints are typically 44 inches wide and that is, you know, if you do something that is this size, that is long and narrow, you can get, you know, half yard or 5/8ths of a yard of fabric and have the width cover something this long. So things to think about as far as you are doing a combination of prints, the things to think about are color, if you want to keep it in the same sort of color story. These here are all, tend to be in blues and greens, cohesive. You can do more contrasting, things to kind of keep in mind. If you are going to large scale prints, you do not necessarily want multiple large scale prints that are going to compete with the each other. The same is true of small scale prints, it is going to be too cluttered looking if you have just a lot of small scale prints. You can mix and match. The same is true for contrasting with a color. You maybe want to choose something that is high in contrast but not too much of the different colors that are going to contrast too much and make your eye go in a lot of different directions. So, like, one possible example would be something like this, a big bold print with lots of different color, and then chose something either in the same line of fabric, or, or not, but that is something that is maybe geometric as oppose to floral and organic looking to complement it in a different color. And then something in the mid-way range with the size, again both this one and the gold one are similar in that there is not a lot of color change happening in the print. And so they are going to compliment and not compete with that big print that has all the different colors. So it is super simple, there are definitely some tricks that are going to make your project more successful. You want to be sure to iron the fabric out really well, you will see any source of crease or wrinkle once you get it put on there. And then when you get your, you can can use a picture frame, or a canvas stretcher bars that comes in like all sorts of different sizes and you can slip those together to make whatever size you want for your space. If you are using a frame, you want something that is straight edged, you do not want something that is ripply or anything like that. You are going to want to fold it over and staple the middle of the sides first. If you are using, if you are doing something that is linear like this, you are going to want to make sure that it is straight. It is this weight fabric can get pulled out of shape fairly easily when you are wrapping it tight to staple it into place. So you just want to kind of check it before you staple it into place. You are going to do the corners at the end, just fold down, wrap, staple. You can staple a couple of times try them as neat as possible. That is one of the reason why we like the mid-weight cottons for this project because if you use a heavier weight, they are going to get really lumpy on the back and there maybe too much fabric to even be able to staple through and it will not lay flat on the wall.