Hello Ohio

I’m in preparation for my week long textile art and quilting course with Nancy Crow in Ohio, which starts on Monday. I decided to buy my fabric on line from America so that it could be sent directly to Ohio, and save me carting it all the way across the Atlantic. I was also worried that the measly 22Kg weight limit on my flight might not be enough to accommodate both my clothes and over100m of fabric, and I didn’t fancy spending the whole week washing out my pants.

Nick is concerned I may be indoctrinated into some weird religious cult, but I think I will be far too busy sewing to worry about sinning. I’m back a week on Sunday, so I’ll give you a full update of my activities then, quilting or otherwise.

We have also been decorating. What with the Paint runner success we have been storming round the house. The lounge ceiling is painted ready for the arrival of the new sofas, and my craft room is ready for the new carpet. The spare bedroom is still under preparation. It’s taking a while as there is only so much polyfillering I can bear in an evening.

I bought a few ‘house’ magazines and was pleased to see that the whole wallpaper fashion is still in full swing. I absolutely love the handpainted chinoiserie look. Unfortunately all the gorgeous wallpapers I like are about £££££ a roll and I am too tight to pay that, especially when I can sniff DIY crafting potential!

So, in true Rachy fashion I set about learning a new craft. First I stripped off the old woodchip wall paper. Then I made up a translucent paint mix using 50% Farrow and Ball emulsion (powder blue) and 50% wallpaper paste. (I got this idea from a library book.) Using a 4 inch brush I roughly painted the wall with random brush strokes. The second coat evened it out quite a lot, but gave the wall a nice depth of colour, instead of a flat tone. It doesn’t look ‘colour washed’ like the fashion in the 90’s, it just looks like a lovely old wall.

Next I searched the internet for a wallpaper pattern I liked, and saved the image to my computer. Using a cunning mix of photoshop and my great artistic skill I plagiarised a pattern I really liked. (Note: Wallpaper websites are quite cunning – they don’t show the entire pattern, so attempting to copy the design involves improvising areas to the sides, top and bottom of the image they let you see. When doing this it’s quite tricky to figure out how the pattern repeats itself. With naturalistic chinoiserie type designs I just filled in with some extra leaves and flowers and it looks fine!) I printed out the design at work using our A2 printer.

Then I bought some stencil film and a heat pen from a stencil website, transferred the design on to the film, and cut it out using the heat pen.

I wanted to avoid the very obviously stencilled look, so used a very soft translucent white over the blue base wall. I stuck the stencil on the wall using repositionable spray mount and got going. Last year I bought Nick a laser spirit level that projects straight lines onto walls, and using that made it much easier to get the repeats perfectly horizontal and vertical.

The effect is soft and pretty and I’m really chuffed. I tried to take a photo for you but the camera battery was dead. I’ll take one when the whole room is finished.