About Wallcovering Patterns
It is important that you understand something about wallcovering patterns BEFORE you pick your first wallcovering to install. You need to understand patterns so you don't pick a wallcovering with a pattern that makes your first installations more difficult...
For purposes of this beginning discussion there are three main pattern types...they are: Random Match, Straight Across Match, Drop Match.
Random Matches are exactly what they say they are. RANDOM. In other words, you don't have to worry about matching anything. You will just cut your wallcovering the length you need and hang it on the wall. A solid color wallcovering with no pattern would be one example of a RANDOM match wallcovering. Obviously with this type of wallcovering you have no pattern matching worries at all. Easy. Easy. Easy. But (in most cases) dull. dull. dull.
STRAIGHT ACROSS Match wallcoverings are those wallcoverings that match directly across the piece of wallcovering. This is the simplest and most common type of pattern match. Look at the two pieces of straight match wallcovering pictured below...
It is fairly easy to see in the example above that the rose on the edge is cut in half. The other half of that rose is directly across the sheet (piece) of wallcovering. And so you have a STRAIGHT match pattern.
What this means is that when you are cutting your pieces of wallcovering for a room with an even ceiling line all the pieces will cut at exactly the same place on your pattern. So if we had the wallcovering pictured above and we wanted the roses to be along the top of our wall we would cut a few inches above the top of the rose...(to leave us some to trim off...). It wouldn't matter if the sheets were going to be six feet or six inches long. We would get a cutting point (in this case three inches above that pretty rose) and use that same cutting point on every sheet...the only variable being the length.
The majority of wallcoverings produced for wallcovering stores are STRAIGHT ACROSS MATCHES. You will make your life easier if you pick those type of patterns if you don't have much experience with installations.
Before we leave this example I want to spend a few minutes and explain PATTERN REPEATS. You'll notice when you looked at the roses pattern above the same pattern repeated itself down the sheet of wallcovering. The distance between the roses going down that sheet is the length of our pattern repeat. Every pattern ever made has a pattern repeat. Some repeats are as little as an inch some as long as several feet.
When you are picking your first wallcovering to install if you pick a small pattern repeat you generally will find it easier to recover if you make any mistakes. Since you must cut at exactly the same point to every sheet to match your wallcovering you usually have less waste with a smaller repeat length. You won't have used as much length if you goof and have to throw away a sheet.
The next pattern match we are going to discuss is DROP match wallcovering. Some people call these half-drops. This is a much more difficult type of pattern match. Look at the sheets below:
If you had this type of pattern match every other sheet of wallcovering would cut in the same place. You can see by looking at our example sheets that the first sheet and the third sheet are exactly the same. The second sheet in order to match the first and third sheet must be cut in a different place on the roll. That is because the match isn't directly across the sheet it is now half way down the pattern repeat. In this type of pattern match you must have TWO cutting points. Much, much more difficult for a beginner.
If you make a mistake and cut your sheets of wallcovering for a DROP match just the same way you do for a STRAIGHT match you'll end up with half your sheets being too short! Awful!
So when you go to the wallpaper store and you're looking through all those books make certain you don't pick a drop match if this is one of your first installation projects. After all, we want you to have FUN...so you'll want to install more wallcovering in the future!
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