Did you know that you can iron fabric to a wall? Until recently, I didn’t either. Think of the possibilities!! It’s less permanent than paint and less expensive than wallpaper. I wish I had known about this during my many, many years living in rentals. After painting my sweet daughter Vera’s nursery a gorgeous bluish-green color (Valspar-Glass Tile), I wanted to paint white polka dots on one wall of the room. I love polka dots! But after finding out recently that we’re moving AGAIN, I decided against the polka dots. After all, our future renters (fingers crossed) might not appreciate a polka dot wall as much as I do.
All you’ll need is a fabric stiffener, some fabric and an iron. And that’s it. I picked up Alene’s Fabric Stiffener and some fat quarters of fabric from Walmart all for less than $10. With a husband on duty and two sleeping babies, I poured myself a glass of wine, turned on some trash TV and got to work. I traced around the top and bottom of a glass on the fabric to create two different sized circles. Armed with my 42 circles and fabric stiffener, I snuck into my sweet baby’s nursery and worked by night light.
I found if I sprayed the fabric really well (to the point of saturation) and stuck them to the wall wet it worked best. The fabric dried in roughly an hour but I let them dry overnight. Once they were dry, I noticed the fabric had bubbled and peeled quite a bit. My iron fixed that problem! I made sure the iron was on the highest setting and that there was no steam. My husband came home early in the morning to find me ironing the wall. He knows better than to ask what I’m doing. Contrary to what I had read online, the iron does mark up the paint a bit. Perhaps it depends on the type of paint on your walls? Who knows. I solved this problem by placing a scrap of the fabric between the wall and iron and ironing over the fabric- problem solved. A quick run of the iron over the fabric on the wall and they’ll look great.
The best thing about this is that the fabric will peel easily from the wall leaving absolutely no residue. Just ask my two year old son. Before I could get to him, he had peeled all the polka dots from the lower half of the wall and thought he was hilarious. I have a feeling I’ll be re-attaching a few more of these before we leave our house.
My little monkey, who helps me (un)decorate.
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