Modernist Artwork to Improve Room Acoustics

We live in an open-plan, all brick and glass house. It is not that we don’t like soft furnishings, it is just that all our couches are leather and we have not gotten around to putting up curtains. Take a blaring television, add a spitting pressure-cooker in the kitchen plus any chatter and you have the makings of insanity. Something had to be done.

I bought a couple of cake boards of the polystyrene and foil variety at a baking supply shop. I took the thickest I could find - very important if you are going to stick nails through to hang, although there are other solutions to circumvent this. These boards are great because they are lightweight, have a bit of spring to them (for thumbtacks) and come in the shapes I needed (no scrambling to cut wooden circles). Furthermore, I used felt in various colours, contact adhesive and electricians tape.

I used black electricians tape to tape the silver edges of the boards so that the humble foundations of my masterpiece would not be visible. You don’t even have to be too particular about this provided that the edges that will ultimately show are tidy and you don’t create thick wrinkles that will be visible under the felt.

The rest is self- explanatory to any crafter. I traced the outline of the shapes on the background colour felt, cut and stuck it on. I then cut abstract shapes (triangles are by far the easiest) of contrasting colours.

The only thing left to do was to leave my husband to solve the problem of fixing nails without them showing through the felt and hanging the grouping. At least there was no top or bottom to contend with. Wassily Kandinsky would be proud ... or horrified.