DIY Shower curtain

Like I said in this post, I bought some 5$ sheers from ikea and used them in the living room. I had a few extras, because at $2.50 a panel we figured we could find a use for them at some point.

We had a shower curtain liner, and wanted a really simple cloth shower curtain to go over it. After reading a few posts on DIYing a shower curtain, I thought it would be worth a try.

Here's what we did:

1 - Grab your liner and take the clips out. You will have to match up the shower curtain holes with the liner holes. At this stage, our shower curtain had also been hemmed on the top - so there were no holes, loops or grommets, just a 2 inch top hem to work with.

2 - Match up the holes. It won't quite match up - the curtain isn't quite as long as a regular shower curtain so for some you will have to skip a hole. Meaning, if you pulled the shower curtain out fully, it would bunch up the liner a little (but we didn't care, you never really need as much length as the shower curtain gives you).

3 - Poke the holes. This seems like a crazy technique.... but so far it's working fine! You might want to do something fancier - use a grommet, sew around the hole etc. But once we did one and realized you couldn't even see the hole when we hung it up, we didn't care. 

4 - Thread curtain onto clips as per usual.

5 - Hang and enjoy your $2.50 shower curtain! (Oh, we also made a nice thick hem at the bottom of the shower curtain using the same iron-on method that used to trim up our other curtains).

Curtain upgrade - no sew

Curtains can be expensive. We have two large floor to ceiling windows that we had to cover, and a very small budget to do it.

At Ikea's Midnight Madness sale a few months ago, I bought 3 packs of sheers for 5$ each ($2.50 a panel!). Once I hung them in the windows, I realized they looked sloppy and cheap, mainly because of the way they were hung - with a loop of fabric around the curtain rod.

I thought about using grommets, but at 5$ a pack (and we would have needed several packs) they would have tripled the cost of the curtains - not worth it. So here's what we did:

Step 1: Chop off those ugly loops of fabric that are hanging the curtains.
Step 2: Grab some bonding web (or take the one that probably came with your curtains)
Step 3: Fold top of curtains over, leaving enough space to fit your curtain rod.

Easy peasy, and it sure classed up our 5$ panels.

DIY Moroccan dhurrie rug

After debating for weeks what rug to get for my living room, I pulled the trigger on Ikea's super cheap Erslev rug in the smaller size (4'7" x 6'7"). It's a white, flat-woven simple rug perfect for DIY. Here's a before pic (sorry, it's a mess, it's the only before pic we snapped):

We wanted our rug to look like some of the Moroccan dhurrie rugs we'd seen, like this one from Shades of Light, or this one from West Elm. I really liked the trellis type patterns on these rugs.

And like I mentioned, we had seen lots of people use paint and a fabric medium on their Erslev rugs (some of my favourites are this one and this one). Unfortunately, I just couldn't stand the thought of a crunchy rug. And since fabric paint sits on the surface instead of sinking in, that's what we would have gotten. We decided to go the route of using fabric dye to colour the rug, and a gel bleach pen to trace a design on to the rug.

We were inspired by this post, where Kendra from Southern Disposition dyed her erslev in the bath tub. So we took to Dharma Trading to see if we could get some dye for our erslev. We chose to go with a grey - specifically, PR41, Charcoal Grey. Sorry - since I was doing the dye myself, I didn't get any photos of the process. Basically, it goes like this:

1. Buy dye and soda ash. You will need about 2-4oz of powder dye to do the whole rug, depending on how deep you want the shade. 
2. Wet your rug first, and then take it out of the shower. 
3. Mix the powder dye in a bowl with a tiny bit of water. It should make a paste. Add more and more until you have about 2 cups of hot water in with the dye.
4. Fill the tub about half way with hot water, and dump your 2 cups of dye into the tub.
5. Stir your rug around - this will be really tough. Especially if you are a one man show. The rug gets really heavy when it's wet, so do your best to move it around. Pull parts out and flip it. 
6. After about 20 minutes, pull the rug to one side and dump some soda ash in. I got a pack at Walmart that was about 500g I think. I dumped half in, and stirred around with the rug. Be careful not to drop any soda ash right onto your rug - this will result in darker dye spots.
7. Pull the rug to the other side of the tub and do the same with the rest of the soda ash.
8. Keep stirring your rug for about an hour. The time here will depend on the shade you want, but 30 minutes to an hour is what you are working with. 
9. Drain all the dye water, and rinse your rug until the water runs clear (expect to rinse for 10-20 mins... this takes forever).

Our rug was too heavy to hang on the shower bar, so we put a chair in the bathtub and propped it up on that, and the next morning put it on the balcony to dry. The whole process was a bit nuts, but it worked.

The colour we got was a bit more blue than we expected, but that's alright. It's a bit of a risk using fabric dye - there are a lot of factors that can affect the final colour of your material.

Once our rug was dry, it was time to draw out the pattern. My first thought was to tape the whole thing with painters tape and cut out the pattern, then spray bleach on to the rug.

Nope, that was a bad idea.
It took forever to even do one stencil, and barely worked.

After that, I decided I would trace the pattern with marker and bleach right over it. I should mention that at this point I was using regular liquid bleach and a Q-Tip to apply.

Nope, this didn't work either.

Using a Q-tip meant everything was too saturated, and the bleach was bleeding outside of the pattern. It looked messy.

I then decided to go out and get the Clorox Bleach Pen. I had seen people draw on other fabrics with it, and it seemed pretty accurate and precise. The bleach pen ended up saving the project.

NOTE: Make sure you get the bleach pen and not another stain remover. This is almost 100% bleach, so the others won't have the same dye-removing power as this one.

I traced the outline with a washable marker, then went over it with the bleach pen. The pen bleached out the marker right away, and provided a solid outline for the rug. For each section, I would go through and make the outline before I filled it in.

Once I had the gel as the outline, I could use regular bleach on a paint brush for the middle. The gel bleach provided a barrier so none of the bleach bled outside. But watch out - if you use a paint brush with black or brown bristles, the colour will bleed onto the rug as the bleach strips it. Use white bristles, and buy the cheap brushes, since you will go through several as the bleach kills each one.

After I had covered the entire rug, I let the bleach dry completely overnight. I then took it outside and beat it - a lot. I had heard that bleach crystals re-activate when you get them wet, and I didn't want that to happen when I rinsed off the rug.

After we shook it out for a while, we rinsed it off in the bath tub. We started by having one person hold the rug horizontally while the other poured water directly through it (to help prevent any bleeding). Once we did this slowly for each section, my rug-devoted boyfriend jumped in the shower and rinsed the whole thing off really well. 

After a few days of drying, we ironed the rug out, and are so happy with the result. The rug feels exactly as soft as it did before - and it's washable!

Probably my favourite part is that the pattern looks a bit faded - like someone had coloured it with chalk. It's really cool.

We decided to use it in the bedroom, but here is one final shot of it in our living room in all it's glory:

I really do recommend trying this project! It is really time consuming, but cost about 80$ for all the materials (including the rug).

I think I'll try making a runner in a similar way, maybe with a brighter colour and more elaborate pattern. You can literally do any design you can imagine with this technique, I hope some of you get to try it!

Dhurrie rug DIY inspiration

I’ve been lusting over dhurrie rugs for months trying to decide if it is worth biting the bullet and laying down a few hundred dollars to get a new rug for my new (upcoming) place.

But $300 for a 5x8 rug like this one from West Elm, or this one from Shades of Light is just too much for a cheapo like me.

I’ve seen a lot of people DIYing their own dhurrie rugs – mainly using regular paint and a fabric medium. Here are a few I loved:

Charm Home Design

Cape 27

Adventures of an almost 40 year old Intern

Diddle Dumpling

As great as these rugs looked, the idea of walking around on a crunchy carpet didn’t appeal to me. And since I’m a disaster 99% of the time, how could I justify spending time to create a rug I couldn’t wash?

But then I saw two projects that gave me inspiration. The first was Kendra over at Southern Disposition who used regular old RIT dye to give her ikea erslev rug a new golden colour.

The second was Amanda at Burlap & Denim who taped off a chevron pattern and used bleach in a spray bottle to “paint” on white stripes.

I have a 40$ white 4x6’ erslev rug from ikea that is begging to get DIYed (I’ve been pinning inspiration for weeks). Here’s the plan:

• Use fabric dye to colour the whole thing a nice limey-minty green (like this wasabi colour from Dharma Trading).
• Tape off a pattern similar to this one (another painted erslev)

• Use bleach in a spray bottle to spray out the white parts
• Have an awesome rug that I can wash when I spill my signature mixture of peanut butter and melted chocolate all over it

Another idea I had explored was to get fabric dye and then use Sodium Alginate to thicken it and paint it on. But with the size of the rug, this seemed like a super expensive project that would kinda defeat the purpose. So I’ll leave that for another time… let us know if you’ve tried it out!

Spray-Painting Ikea Lockers

I had these lovely Ikea lockers (sort of like the Ikea PS Cabinet, but from 2001) that I had done some 13-year-old damage to and as-is, were unusable. First, they were a terrible green colour that would match literally nothing. The other issue was that I had decided to spray paint a gold star onto one of them (a theme of my bedroom at the time… there was a giant one on my ceiling that my dad later told me took 7 coats of primer to cover).  Needless to say, they needed some work.

Lindsay and I decided to go to our parents’ house for the weekend to see if we could salvage them.  I headed to home depot and stared at the Rustoleum paint colours forever (I decided to use Rustoleum after reading about the love affair the folks over at Young House Love had with it. They’ve done a few things with it, and I read Sherry’s spray painting tips 10x over before deciding to take this project on). At first I thought a bright colour would work best – maybe teal or burnt orange. But then I realized that a colour like that would mean they would have to be an anchor piece in a room –  I’d have to have other furniture and colours work around them. And I was not prepared to make a decision like that.

Instead, I decided to go with a charcoaly-blacky-greyish-sparkly colour from their metalics line. It sort of reminded me of sparkly pavement. The official name is Dark Bronze (but it looked more grey than chocolate bronze, so we went for it).

The first step was removing all the craziness I had added to the lockers when I was 13. This included the gold star (which we sanded off with steel wool), as well as little stickers I had used to hang pictures and calendars.

After we removed the detritus from the surface, we gave it a good wipe down and dried them both off (don't mind the crazy outfits.... they were all we had that could be sacrificed for painting).

Next we had to tape off the light-grey metal bits that we wanted to keep their colour. This included the legs and little key holes. We had no painters tape, so just went with duct tape (knowing full well what a pain it would be to peel off in the morning).

Then, we took a little break (cause taping is tough work!).

We only bought one can of primer (key learning #1: buy 2 cans of primer) so we went to work covering as much of the green and gold as we could.

When the can ran out, it was still super patchy. It looked a little bit like terrible camouflage, which made us nervous.

But, instead of buying another can of primer to finish up (see key learning #1) we decided the dark spray paint would cover it – we had heard that Rustoleum was a cover-anything on any surface kind of paint. But after a few coats, we were still seeing camouflage. We had 2 cans of the spray paint, but when they ran out, we were nowhere near done. Here’s what it looked like after 2 cans:

So off to home depot we went to get another 2 cans and came home to finish the job. The paint had dried and looked a bit better at this point, but we decided to keep loading it on.

Unfortunately, nothing was changing – the patchy look was remaining no matter how much paint we sprayed on. In the end we probably did 8-10 light easy coats (we made sure not to spray too close or heavy, especially since this is what we thought was causing the patchiness). When we realized nothing was changing with the paint anymore and our efforts were useless, we decided to call it a day. Maybe tomorrow it would look less patchy, we thought.

Well, we were right.

I think because of the nature of this colour / style of paint, it is supposed to look like textured metal. As soon as we brought them out of the sun the paint looked more even – less patchy, more textured. And since we had put it on so thick, no green was showing through at all.

The only thing I need to touch up a bit is the area right around the key hole, since we didn’t tape with as much precision as we should have.

Other than that, we are thrilled with the results, especially after having such bad luck getting the even coat we wanted the day before. We love the sparkly-ness of the lockers, and how dark they turned out!

Here's the rundown of what we learned.

Do:

• Paint outside / in a garage. The stuff smells, and it gets everywhere.
• Buy more primer than you think you need. And more paint. You will need it.
• Wash and scrape the crap out of your metal piece before you spray. Everything shows through, so even if it seems like just a bit of sticker grime, scrape it off, because otherwise you will just make it more permanent and noticeable with your paint.

Don’t:

• Paint outside when it’s windy and sunny. The wind was a big issue for us and more ended up on my face than did on the lockers. The sun was just an issue for us because it really threw off the colour and texture of the lockers and looked totally different once we got inside.
• Do all the spraying yourself. After a total of 5 full cans of spray paint, my hands were exhausted. Seriously – check out this pic of me crazily gripping the can using my thumbs to press down because my other fingers couldn’t hack it anymore. And my forearms are sore today! Craziness. Get a friend to help (in this case, Lindsay’s freestyling personality wasn’t exactly ideal for the job, so she helped with the other parts of the project).
• Expect perfection. Spray paint can get you closer than regular paint – there are no brush strokes. But expect to have to do a few touch-ups at the end.

For now they are sitting at my parent’s house so the paint can cure up nice and strong. Then when we move in July they will come to the new apartment, potentially to hold our TV, or act as a dresser in our bedroom. We’ll see!