Southwest Interior Designs

southwest interior designspage 49 of 107

 had never even seen--the destiny of which unfortunate
copy, changed in size, colour, and all the qualities which gave value to
the original, is probably to be hung as a picture in the centre of a
space of wall-paper totally antagonistic in colour.

When I see these things I long to curb the ambition of the unfortunate
tapestry-painter until a course of study has taught him or her the
proper use of a really useful process; for whether the object is to
produce a decoration or a simulated tapestry, it is not attained by
these methods.

The ordinary process of painting in dyes upon a wool or linen fabric
woven in tapestry method, and fixing the colour with heat, enables the
painter--if a true tapestry subject is chosen and tapestry effects
carefully studied--to produce really effective and good things, and this
opens a much larger field to the woman decorator than the ordinary
unstudied shams which have thrown what might become in time a large and
useful art-industry into neglect and disrepute.

I have seen the walls of a library hung with Siberian linen, stained in
landscape design in the old blues and greens which give tapestry its
decorative value, and found it a delightful wall-covering. Indeed we may
lay it down as a principle in decoration that while we may use and adapt
any decorative _effect_ we must not attempt to make it pass for the
thing which suggested the effect.

Coarse and carefully woven linens, used as I have indicated, are really
far better than old tapestries for modern houses, because the design can
be adapted to the specific purpose and the texture itself can be easily
cleaned and is more appropriate to the close walls and less airy rooms
of this century.

For costly wall-decoration, leather is another of the substances which

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