Tags
blinds, crafts, drop cloth, mini blinds, roman shades, sewing, skirted table, upcycle
Genius. Whoever thought up the idea to use canvas drop cloths as decor? Effing genius.
When I set out to make roman shades from the existing mini-blinds for the kitchen, I had every intention of buying a pair of Ikea curtains and cutting them up, but my window was two inches too wide. After digging through back issues of Domino (oh, how I miss, thee!), I had a mini epiphany… Drop cloth! Maybe Martha thought it up. Maybe not. Either way, I was did The Dance of Joy after realizing that Nathan was at Lowes at the time of said epiphany. A quick call and I was thirty minutes away from a hand-delivered 9×12′ canvas drop cloth.
I brushed up on a fantastic tutorial over at Little Green Notebook, measured my windows and started hacking up the drop cloth. It didn’t take long to realize that I was going to have TONS of fabric left over.
This is what I had to start with. Oh, it was wonderful. (Eye roll.)
Let us ignore the beautimous beach-themed wallpaper border circling the room, yes? It came with the house – I feel it extremely obligated to shirk credit for that doosey, and after six months of living here, I haven’t the gall to try to rip it down. How do I even start to get wallpaper off of textured walls?
And it looks so much better now. The color of the walls and the fabric are a near perfect match, which drives me batty, but once we get around to tackling the kitchen, rest assured that I will not be keeping that wall color. I have plans to add trim around the perimeter of the shades, but until we establish some kind of plan for the room, I’m on hold. Besides, I majorly need to address that table and chairs from when we first got married before I start to worry about the tiny things.
All that cutting and sewing and hot-glueing left my mind to wander. Should I cover my beat-up ottoman in a drop-cloth, too? Nah. But I did decide to skirt a table with what I had left over. It is a pretty simple do-jobbie, and attached with velcro. We’re high-class up in this bee-yatch.
This poor table has seen a lot. It isn’t my favorite piece of furniture, but it does its job. It started as a sofa table in my parents’ house. Then it traveled to Spokane with me and got a $5.00 Target mirror for a top…
Oooh. Festive.
And then was coated in white paint…
Circa 2008, showing off my “giant” 12-week preggo belly.
Later, it had an unfortunate accident with a green table cloth at our old house…
It is even embarrassed. See it hiding behind the chairs?
And after a second mirror was smashed to pieces by an errant Little Tikes basketball (thank you, Finn, for making me realize that a glass top table has no place in a home with small children), I decided to top it in a couple of extra floor tiles from our bathroom remodel in the first house.
Dare I say it looks the best it has since its humble beginnings as a 1980’s smoked-glass top sofa table? Meh. I’m not in love with it, but it will do for now. It does its job, which is to hide the printer and all sorts of other random stuff that ends up on the dining room table. (And I need to get something on these bare walls!)
I still have about a third of the fabric left – and my $20.00 drop cloth has already seen me through two decent sized projects. I’m about to cover the whole house in drop cloths… Or join a twelve-step program to reign in my enthusiasm for the stuff. Where, oh where will it turn up next?
