Fabric Wallpaper

If I had my way, I would purchase rolls of temporary wallpaper from domesticate's shop on Spoonflower and go crazy with color and design.  Alas, those rolls are $60 each and . . . I really in no way have that kind of money.  There are, however, alternatives for renters in search of ways to put temporary color and pattern on the walls.  Sometimes those options can be pretty affordable.  

I decided to go with hanging fabric on the walls.  I was especially intrigued by the idea of using fabric starch to adhere fabric to the walls.  Starch is supposed to work as wallpaper paste, but release cleanly.  

That is totally not what I did in my test case-our hallway linen closet.

I have no idea whether liquid starch is easy to come by in Savannah or not.  I didn't even look for any.  As I may have mentioned before, our apartment is painted with flat paint.  I can't clean the walls without leaving marks so I was not willing to take any chances with liquid anything.  Plus, that was way too many steps.

I decided to go with tools and materials I had on hand--some batik from my fabric stash and my handy staple gun.  I can not remember why or when I bought this batik but I am 90% certain it came from JoAnn's.

It took maybe a yard and a half to do the closet interior.  I washed and pressed the fabric first, then measured my walls and cut pieces to fit.  Why yes that is Bushido Brown.

I removed each shelf and stapled as close to the edge of the fabric as possible.  I was worried that the staples would show at first, but the print does a great job distracting the eye.

On a side note, removing the shelves (they aren't attached to anything-they just rest on these supports) uncovered all kinds of gross goodies from previous tenants.  As you can see, this spray paint job they did in this apartment is . . . . not that thorough at all.

Measuring and trimming before stapling was by far the easiest way to do the whole project.  If you look up the process on the web, you'll probably see pictures of a straight edge and a box cutter or something to trim the excess edges.

That . . .  is utter bullshit.  The razor blade trim method worked-but not at all well.  Just measure, trim, and staple.  Then stand up and decide it looks good enough from your regular point of view.

Overall, I was pleased with how my fabric wallpaper test run turned out.  This was essentially a zero dollar upgrade since I used stuff I already had and did not purchase anything especially for the project.

So pleased, in fact, that I got really ambitious.  More on that later.