Playing Blocks: Starting Over Again

We moved about two months ago, and people have been clamoring for pictures of the new place ever since. I wish I could say that it's taken us this long to get settled in, but it hasn't. We were unpacked, and had all the decor up on the walls within a week. And by decor I mean we put up the Sid Dickens blocks.


It's not much of an excuse, but in addition to not posting pictures until now, we've been terribly slow at having a little gathering at our new place to break it in. Maybe in a week or two.

I took pictures at various points in the process of hanging the Sids (aka playing blocks). For those who have never hung their tiles before, this might serve as a useful tutorial in how to hang 70 blocks in one afternoon (and I know a few blockhos out there who are interminable stallers when it comes to hanging their blocks cough Kitchenette and WishfulThinking cough cough).

For most collectors, however, you'll probably scroll through the pictures once or twice and remember your own adventures hanging blocks, and then you'll spend more time looking at the final products at the bottom.

For non-collectors ... what are you even doing here?

Disclaimer for the faint of heart - if the pictures don't make you squeamish or offended, my commentary probably will.

Now, on with the pictures (remember, if you click on a picture, you can see a larger version of it and zoom to your heart's or your web browser's content).

The first thing I do when hanging my tiles is get out my trusty tools. A measuring tape, my antique yard stick (in Canada, we converted to metre sticks before I was born), screwdriver, drill, pencil, and a bag full of home-made SidSavers.

You'll notice the absence of a level, which was probably also absent when my home was constructed. I go for trueness. Level is a waste of time. Next I painstakingly measure out spots for the SidSavers, I drill holes, I screw in the SidSavers and voila ... a wall full of SidSavers.

We have accumulated more Sids than is sane, so one wall isn't enough. Hence, wall number two.

Now, my first mistake, of many, was my measurement down from the plate rail. I didn't leave space between the top of the tile and the plate rail. So, I had to take out the entire top row and drop them a 1/4 inch. Maybe one day I'll figure out how to actually measure twice and drill once.

The second adventure is that I always seem to find a patch of wall that simply will not accept a screw. I turn the screw in, and the wall keeps spitting it back out at me. Eventually, I say"screw it" and hammer in a nail. (Fortunately, I have a designated tile for the spot on the wall that doesn't like being screwed. It's my duplicate Target tile. I bought one for myself, and then one of my very favouritist blockhos had Sid sign a Target tile for me specially. We won't mention that she forgot which tile I actually wanted, because she held onto her beer while smashing tiles on Sid's feet - and all of this was only possible because she crashed the private event signing party!)

Now that I've got my walls of SidSavers, I start unpacking. If you're squeamish, my packing and especially my unpacking will offend you tremendously. Think about unicorns for a second while you scroll through the next few pictures.

They all survived the move, so my method must've worked ;)

And of course I love closeups of the tiles, especially from the angles that show off the depth of the tiles.

And closer still ...

Now, you can see my problem. I have 70 tiles on a small piece of carpet, in a completely random order that results from hasty packing and lackadaisical unpacking. So now I have to start sorting them.

The first thing I do is split them up in one group of 40 and another group of 30, one group for each wall.

Now the real work begins. I have to try and figure out how I'm going to display everything. My last display was based on lots and lots of symmetry in a 7x5 layout in the main display, and an ever-growing 3x3/5/7/9/11 secondary display. This time, not so much luck with the symmetry.

I decided that since I had a display of 40 and a display of 30, I should find tiles that I like grouped in sets of four, and sets of three. So that's what I started doing.

You can see some of the more obvious groupings - three skulls (aka the Hank series), three hearts, four gameboard pieces, four musical tiles, four crowns, and three French Crests (including the two special North Carolina tiles).

Yes, you're seeing that correctly. Tiles stacked on tiles with nothing in between. Horror of horrors!

Before I clumsily step on a pile of tiles and trip myself onto the rest of the blocks, I hastily start putting them on the wall.

So that's the bigger display, in all it's quartet glory. And next we've got the triplets display.

And then an obligatory shot from an angle to display the depth of the tiles.

And one final shot showing off all 70 tiles at once.

And that is how you hang 70 tiles in a day.

If you have any questions, or you want to hire the Sid Dickens tile hanging team, please let me know ;)