Like most folks, if you’ve hung up pictures or other decorations to make your house feel more like home, those things are going to leave holes in the walls when they come down. Whatever the subject matter, a group of five or a dozen with a single theme can make an unusual artistic wall display.How to Cover Up Holes in Your Walls Permanent Solutions To Covering Wall Holes Still others have interesting pressed-metal edges. Other collectors focus on the composition of the cover: Some were made of thin wood others painted to look like wood. Other collectible flue covers are those commemorating a particular event or that have pictures of churches or public buildings. Early in the 20th century, ladies painted innumerable china teacups and dinner plates, mostly with flowers, and flue covers were another conveniently-sized painting surface. One popular type, the hand-painted cover, usually features flowers. Collectors of flue covers often specialize in a kind of subject matter, such as lovely ladies, small children, winter scenes, dogs or cats, and so on. Today, chimney flue covers are interesting wall decorations evocative of the past. By the 1940s, the women on flue covers were pictured with shorter skirts and often posed in kitchen aprons. Snowy woods and boating scenes perhaps suggest appeal to men. Lovely ladies with luxurious long hair in close-ups imply Art Nouveau influence. Happy family scenes of corseted ladies and primly dressed children began in the 1800s. The subject matter and dress and hairstyle of ladies suggest initial dates of some flue cover designs, but of course, if popular, the same lithograph continued to be reproduced for another decade or three. Well into the 1940s in America, fanciful flue covers were given away in the thousands by doctors, dentists, shopkeepers, plumbers and so on. Advertising a business’s name on freebies was a later inspiration. Before 1900, a cheerful picture was considered effective sales promotion although the giver’s name did not appear on the item. Today, we receive calendars, yardsticks and coffee mugs, all of which tout some business by name. Ībout the turn of the last century, shopkeepers discovered the value of building goodwill by means of inexpensive giveaways. Also, a few are quite small in diameter (4”) and a few quite large (16”). While the preponderance of flue covers are round and dinner-plate sized, some are oval, others rectangular. Or the entire outer metal band may have been crinkled symmetrically as a decorative touch. That frame may be a single band of a solid color or have smaller circling bands inside (usually black). In a more common style, the picture covers only the center 3”-5”, leaving a wide “frame” around it. Often, a narrow chain surrounds the plate’s edge and becomes a loop at the top for hanging the cover. In one flue cover style, a picture under glass covers the entire surface of the flue cover. Many flue covers appear to modern eyes like upside-down paper plates with small pictures in the centers. Some flue covers were hand-painted on the inside of round or oblong glass surfaces, but most had a printed picture applied under a thin glass layer with a cardboard backing. These flue covers were dinner-plate sized, slightly convex, and often decorated. In other homes, removable metal plates were used. In the Victorian era, flue openings were sometimes covered with wrought iron or brass grilles that could be left in place year around. Different flue covers were used in different rooms, and over the years, styles varied along with fashions in clothing and furnishings. Innumerable kinds of flue covers have been invented, but the usual ones for inside the house were decorative round metal or cardboard “plates” about 8” in diameter that would hang via a chain or hook over a flue opening. Flue openings were covered to make rooms more attractive (and keep small animals and children’s toys out of the pipes). Each room had a flue opening, but heating pipes were often removed in the spring and stored until fall, leaving openings (often unsightly) in the walls. But in the days when houses were heated with wood, oil or coal-stoves, heat carried up through brick or stone chimneys to the upper floors. You may never have a chimney or wall duct opening in your home that needs covering, so you won’t be in need of a decorative flue cover.
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