I wanted to get grandpa's room done first, and I will show it in a later post.
So this is sort of a DIY fabric border as well!
The boys' room theme is race cars.
I spent hours on google and pinterest looking for ideas on how to paint and decorate their room. I found some pretty cool stuff! One thing I found was two colored walls! I've always just had one color on the walls, but I love the look of two. So I decided to go with blue on the top half and green on the bottom- which meant a border needed to go in the middle. It took me a while to decide on what I wanted for the border, and I knew it needed to be race car themed.
I finally decided to make it a road.
I wanted the boys to be able to drive their toy cars on it, so we set it at 3' from the floor. So the bottom 3' of the wall is green and the rest of the top is blue.
Originally I was going to purchase a wallpaper border- the kind you just get wet and stick on the wall.
Then I found this: lil Mop Tom: {EASY} Fabric Roads
The mama on the blog used old jeans to cut out fabric roads for her son to play with! That looked right up my boys' alley!
Then I thought to myself, self, is it possible to use this same idea and make the border out of old jeans to look like a road?
I did a little more research on getting fabric to stick to the wall. I knew I wanted it to be as flat as possible so the boys couldn't pull it off the wall. I also didn't want to use nails or tacks because this is a rental house and I don't want 17million holes in the walls. Sticky back velcro was an idea, but I knew it would make the top and bottom of the border bumpy and the middle flappy. There was a pretty cool idea here: The Thrifty House: Iron on Wall Art but I was worried that the weight of the denim would cause it to fall. After all I wanted one long strip, not a bunch of small sections.
A friend on Facebook recommended spray adhesive. Spray adhesive? What is this stuff you're talking about??
This is what she showed me: Walmart.com 3M Super 77 Multipurpose Adhesive
So the next time I went to Walmart I picked up a can for just around $11.
I already had a tote full of our old jeans- mostly full of crotch and knee rips. I've been saving them to make a skirt for myself and my sister, but decided to go ahead and use them and if I had enough left over to continue with my plan for the skirts.
I spent a couple of hours cutting the legs out of the pants. I liked the size lil Mop Top suggested of 6" wide, so I only kept the pieces that were at least that wide. Anything smaller I set aside for the skirts.
Once I got all of the jeans cut into their strips, I began serging them together at each end like you would a quilt. I wound up with a very long roll of denim with various shades and textures.
I measured each section of wall between the door, closet, and windows and cut the roll into those lengths. I have PLENTY left over for the skirts, which is exciting!
Then I ironed the strips and used some heavy spray starch to get it as stiff as possible. I've never used spray starch before, and I was actually expecting a lot more crispness than I got, but I was afraid of using too much, so I just went with how it came out. It actually worked out nicely because I was still able to loosely roll the fabric strips for easier wall mounting.
I serged the top and bottom of the long strip to make a continuous somewhat straight line. I gotta tell ya, serging 15' of fabric in one continuous line is not really hard to do, but it IS hard to keep straight. It didn't help that the height of each section of jeans were a bit different as well, being that some came from kid pants and some came from adult pants.
So my strips were done and I was ready to get to work!
My tools were:
My measured, serged stripes of denim
The spray adhesive
A towel
A yellow fabric paint pen
And an old paint brush from a watercolor set.
With Hubby's help, we started by one window and I sprayed the back of the denim and stuck a section to the wall. It held BEAUTIFULLY!! And was VERY easy to stretch and smooth the wrinkles out of. He would hold the roll of denim and unroll 1-2 feet of it and I would spray the back and then press it to the wall. We continued like this until the whole room was done!
Afterward I used the yellow fabric paint pen to draw little rectangles down the center of the denim road strip to create the yellow lines you see in a real road! At first I was just using the pen, and it was making quite a thick amount of paint. I knew that would take forever to dry, so I decided to grab a little paintbrush out of a watercolor set and brush the fabric paint to thin it out. It really worked great!!
I actually kind of liked the wiggly squiggly crookedness of the road!
I even made sure to add the little 4" piece in the corner between the door and closet door :)
And there you have it!!
Mama made, upcycled, super thrifty
road border!!
After the paint dried I turned the kids loose on it. They had been anxiously waiting to get to play on their new road!
