Hanging Photo Backdrops

I’ve had seamless photo paper for a while – I love the clean uncluttered look it provides. But it was a pain to hang since I don’t have a backdrop frame, and I always needed Hubby to help rig it up in our entryway, between the staircase and the sewing studio. 

A while back I saw this great tutorial on Sugar Bee Crafts where Mandy tells about how she got around this issue. 

I showed it to Hubby and he agreed it was a great idea. There was just one problem – Mandy’s garage door is two cars wide, whereas I have two one car wide garage doors. So after Hubby read the tutorial, he pointed out this issue:

Mandy has her paper hung on the edge of her garage door, between the opener and the track. As you can see from the red arrows above, in my garage that width is half of what hers is, so her method wouldn’t work in my garage. 

Hubby and I scratched our heads. We brainstormed lots of work arounds. And then we realized, since our tracks are closer together, we could just hang the paper on the actual track, behind the opener. 

So, with the garage door halfway down, Hubby cut two wood closet rods to size and wiggled them into the garage door track. Then he pulled them all the way to the back of the track, where there was just enough room for the two papers before the arm of the opener hits them. 

We didn’t even bolt them in, because the bolt on the end of the track stops them from falling off. We did tie twine around the less frequently used paper in the back, so it won’t unroll when I unroll the front paper since they’re so close to each other. 

And voila, now I can take pictures like this one, all by myself!

By the way, that is Munchkin. Molly the mannequin was not helpful at all while I was fitting the Blank Slate Basics patterns (heck, she and her too perky boobs isn’t always helpful when I’m fitting clothes for me, and that’s the whole reason I got her! Uncooperative mannequin.), so I made up my mind I was going to order one from here because that’s where the girls from Simple Simon & Co. said they got theirs. I had it in my shopping cart when I decided to check Craigslist, just in case. Lo and behold, someone had Munchkin posted for $30…SCORE! It was in a town south of here where my littlest brother happens to live, so I called him and he was nice enough to pick it up for me and hold it until the next time one of us visited. I suspect  you are going to be seeing Munchkin modeling a lot of clothes in the near future, as it’s not nearly as prone to running off the background as some other models I know (cough – Tater and Bean – cough). 

Have you ever gotten a great secondhand sewing score?