Yes, you can frame wallpaper! Wallpaper turns the walls of your home into decor itself. It’s putting patterns, images, or even art pervasively across the walls of your home. Whether it’s floral or plant-printed, or some other type of image or pattern, it could make your walls come alive and exude some extra energy. That said, people rarely use all the wallpaper in the roll on their walls. Indeed, you likely have some left over after finishing your project. The question then becomes, what do you do with that extra bit of wallpaper? Well, since you’re on our site, you probably already know the answer we’re going to give: frame it!
Framing wallpaper isn’t quite like your basic art or photo, though. So some special consideration probably needs to be made. Do you want to frame just one consistent piece of unused wallpaper? You can do that! Maybe you want to make a patchwork type of collage, with a bunch of different unused pieces from different parts of your home. You can do that, too!
It doesn’t even need to be an unused piece of wallpaper. You could have just seen a design on some wallpaper that you like enough to put in a frame, but not an entire wall. If that’s the case, buy a small piece of it and frame away!
There are tons of different types of wallpaper out there, so instead of giving specific stylistic suggestions(we would be here all day), we’ll just give some general guidelines to follow. Of course, at the end of the day, do with your home as you like! These are just some basic thoughts to maybe consider when wanting to frame wallpaper.
Where To Find Wallpaper
Before you frame or lay down some wallpaper, it might be helpful to know where to get it from. Wallpaper is making a massive comeback. So it should be pretty easy to find. If there’s a Home Depot in your area, you should be able to find some. If you don’t see anything that you like from there, you can always check out a site like Spoonflower.
They even have a cool feature (which we linked to) that allows you to upload your own image files and turn them into wallpaper! So you can literally make something that’s all your own. Another option is Etsy, as they have pretty much everything under the sun. There should be something for you, regardless if you want to get something from your local home improvement store, make something all your own, or support an independent artist.
Consider The Color Wheel
We’ve spoken about this before when discussing posters. But we feel it might be good to bring up, just as a refresher. Wallpaper can be, well, busy. It can have busy patterns and lots of different colors. Because of this, you’ll want to be sure to consider the color wheel when making a frame (and matting) for your wallpaper. The color wheel is the foundation of how your favorite artists and graphic designers manage to make colors that look good together.
For this, using complementary colors would always be best. Those are simply colors that exist on opposite sides of the wheel. For instance, yellow and blue are on the opposite sides of the color wheel. They work well together. This is why you see so many logos utilizing these colors; they look good together!
Other examples are magenta and green or light blue and orange. Other things to consider are warm and cool colors. The warm colors are ones that you’d associate with warm colors — the reds, yellows, and oranges. The cool colors are the opposite — blues, greens, and magenta. Of course, there are degrees to this, too: magenta is going to be a “warmer” cool color than a pure blue, and a greenish-yellow might be cooler than your other warm colors. So, again, it’s all by degrees.
How does this affect you framing your wallpaper? Well, patterned wallpaper is sort of in right now. A basic Google search will likely tell you that wallpapers with leaf and other-like patterns are especially in. So if you want to frame a piece of them, you would likely want to get a frame that matches the general pattern. Of course, you could simply go with a color outside the wheel, like white or black, which are pretty much universal and make the task easier for you. That works, too!
Consider The Shapes On The Wallpaper
It’s not just colors that complement and contrast. Shapes can too! You might have very square, rigid, almost polygon-like shapes on your wallpaper. If that’s the case, you might want to get a frame that has a similar aesthetic. For instance, our Ashford, Stafford, or Bradford styles are all pretty square. This would go great with all things blocky and angular.
That said, you might have more curved shapes in your wallpaper. If that’s the case, just go with the opposite! For this, we recommend Hanover or Ashford, specifically. They both have curved fronts and would go well with any shapes that are circular, spherical, or the like!
This is less technical than figuring out the colors to use, yes. But it might be something worth considering if you want to make the perfect complement for your wallpaper.
Consider Where In The House You Want To Frame
This has less to do with the room itself, and more to do with the wallpaper on the walls. You could absolutely put a piece of wallpaper in a frame and place it on walls covered in the same decorative parchment. That said, you might want to put it in a different spot in your home. If you think the design or color on wallpaper has enough positive aesthetic to put across the walls of a certain room, you might want to put a smaller piece of it in a different room (in a frame, of course).
You could put a different patterned wallpaper in that room, and then frame a small piece of a different variety on top of it. That might be the best way to go to avoid things being monotone, or having the frame look like an oddly placed metal or wood square on an otherwise mono-patterned wall. Of course, if that’s something you’d like to do, then go for it! But it’s always good to consider that most people frame things to get a different art or pattern than what’s on your wall by default. Just something to consider!
We also have plenty of good posts about framing in various rooms of your home, if you need some inspiration in that regard.
Consider How Many Frames Of Wallpaper You Want
Maybe you want to do more than just one piece of wallpaper in a frame. Maybe you want to do a triptych or diptych of sorts. This is definitely possible! The frames can be as large or as small as you want them to be. They can be two giant frames next to each other that form an almost wall-covering diptych, or it can be a small patch of wallpaper standing up in a frame on your nightstand.
For the former, you might want to use the frames almost as an imitation of wallpaper. Maybe you want to cover as much of the walls in wallpaper as the gallery of frames would allow. For this, we have tons of good tips for making gallery walls that might help you out.
This, of course, would influence how much wallpaper you buy. So it’s always good to consider!
Papering The Walls Of Your Home
Wallpaper has been around since the 18th century. And it just shows you one thing, the best things are centuries-old for a reason, they just work, look good, or both. With wallpaper, we like to think it’s both. If something is designed to go all across your walls, it probably has some pretty appealing designs on it.
That said, there are some things you might want to consider when framing your wallpaper. Just remember the following, and you should be ready to frame:
- Consider the color wheel.
- Consider the shapes on the wallpaper.
- Consider where in your home you want to frame it.
- Consider how much wallpaper you want to frame.
If you have some framed wallpaper in one of our frames, feel free to share it with us on Instagram. We’d love to see it!
