Dear Brenda: Yes, you can really do this! Handmade paper can be absolutely incredible on a wall. Unlike commercial wallpapers where the designs are often fairly predictable, every piece of handmade paper is slightly different. We always tell our customers that it brings a whole new meaning to the term “dye lot”! But that is the charm and appeal of these papers, and once you start, you will find they are like potato chips, nobody is happy with just one or two. We should know, we started out with 25 different papers 10 years ago and now we stock more than 800 different kinds.

Before you start
Although it is easy to work with them there are a few things to be aware of before you start.

First of all, most handmade papers are not nearly as strong or heavy as most wallpapers. Because of this they will need to be handled with more care. Since by their very nature (handmade) they do not come on
rolls, they come as individual sheets. This means that you will have to decide how you are going to handle the seamed areas.

Sealing up the seams
One of the things you can do is to accent each separate sheet. A number of years ago we saw a fabulous room vignette in Bloomingdales in New York where the designer had taken pieces of handmade paper with a hand painted design on them, put them up in staggered pattern (so that all the seams did not line up) and then covered each and every seam with split bamboo, making the entire wall look like an art gallery of fabulous paintings.

Another way to use the papers is to take the handmade paper sheet and to tear it into “tiles” all the same size (6” x 6”, etc.) then to put the papers up this way. By tearing the sheets you will be making your own “deckle” edges.

Larger Sheets
There are also much larger sheets of handmade paper available. We have a collection that we call our Casablanca’s, and they are hand thrown paper pulp sheets 30’ x 8 ft. with various things like bamboo foliage, wandering twine, etc. actually embedded in the pulp. These can be put up just like regular wallpaper, but if you want something a little less permanent you can also use the same trick we did when we did a dining room makeover for The Christopher Lowell show a few years ago. We just stapled up the Casablanca Paper, then used a botanical ribbon to simultaneously hide the seams and accent the individual panels of paper.

What to use?
We recommend a good commercial, premixed, water based wallpaper paste – available at any home improvement store. The one rule we always caution people on when they are thinking about using any paper other than commercial wallpaper for their walls, is to FIRST put up strippable wallpaper lining on your walls. This is inexpensive, gives you a nice, smooth surface for your papers, and, most importantly, if and when you get tired of the look, you can easily strip it off! If you don’t do this critical first step you may find yourself with a bucket of warm water, lots of sponges and a two month project!

That said, the world of alternative papers is absolutely endless and endlessly fascinating. We papered our entire connecting hallway between our showroom area and our warehouse with three colors of our Metallic Wash Tissue, “Copper”, “Silver”, and “Gold”. We “distressed” it (fancy word for wrinkling), put it up with the premixed water based wallpaper paste, then drizzled some acrylic metallic paint down it to blend the three tissue colors – Wow! That hallway looks like it has an old, weathered copper wall!

A word of warning – a whole new world opens up when you start working with handmade papers. I don’t really know what it is, but ask anyone who gets hooked on these beautiful papers – they are addictive, and you will find yourself thinking up projects so that you have an excuse to get more paper!