New year means a new blog post from me, the last few months have been crazy busy, I was fully consumed by doing up a house for rental on a very tight budget. I have lots to share you you but haven't had the time until now.
It can get really frustrating and demotivating when you don't have the budget for all the lovely things you would like to fill your interiors with. It also doesn't help that instagram can seem full of things that are way out of reach, but are of course beautiful. I do have a major positive for you though, I honestly think that doing interiors on a low budget feeds creativity. I might splash out on the occasional thing but most of the time I buy second hand, upcycle, adapt, build, make and create features and furnishings. In the shared rental property I needed to keep the designs interesting, practical, stand out from the crowd (a little but not too much) and keep to a tiny budget. The time-lapse video of me creating this abstract striped headboard feature is my most popular post on instragram to date (can't believe it has had over 25000 views!) so I thought I would share with you how I did it. All you need is:
Paint
Masking tape
Tape measure
A plumb line or laser
Pencil
Did I mention there was a massive time pressure with this project so my pre-planning was a bit rushed, can you tell?!
Taping
My sketch was enough to go by though. I started by deciding how big I wanted the striped area to be. I knew I wanted it to be large and wider than the bed so I went as wide as I could without getting the sockets and light switch involved. I used an old fashioned plumb line to draw the outer vertical lines with a pencil (very important that you use a pencil so you can rub out any white stripe edges at the end) and measured from the ceiling down to mark out the horizontal outer line (always check with a spirit level in case your ceiling isn't straight!). Once I had the outer area marked out I needed a starting point. As the diagonal line going from the top right corner was the only thing that went all the way from one edge to the other. I thought this seemed the best place to start taping from. Once I had this line I could start taping the longest vertical section. I decided on a stripe width of 6.5cm, it just seemed right to me and of course I have to make it difficult for myself. I also had to keep reminding myself to include the width of the tape I had just stuck down when measuring the next white line. One thing you could do that would save a lot of time and measuring is to use a wide width of tape and that would be your stripe width. This would mean only using one piece of tape to block out every white stripe. Would be so much quicker!
I decided roughly how wide I wanted this vertical section to be and made sure I finished it with a full width white stripe. I then removed the middle section of the full diagonal line to make way for the diagonal stripes coming from the left corner. I decided how wide I wanted this section to be and made sure it divided into 6.5 so I would have a full set of uniform width stripes. I then did the same for each section, making sure each section apart from the outer edges, finished on a white stripe.
Painting
Painting was the easy bit really, I went over every bit of masking tape so smooth it down and make sure it was all fully stuck down. When I applied the paint I used small strokes working away from the tape edges rather than brushing against them. I applied two coats, of course there were a few annoying black drips on the white, then left it a few days before the super exciting bit of removing the tape to reveal the finished pattern. I used tesa tape which was gifted to me and worked perfectly.
See more pics of the process below. I've also just uploaded the full time-lapse video to my IGTV (instagram tv) if you fancy checking it out, you can also view my full range of dungarees! Please let me know if you have any questions, always here to help you out.