Living in a Nutshell: Designing Out of the Box

House Dressing

For many of my “out of the box” design ideas for my “small as a box” apartment, I went no further than my local copy shop. I love photo transfer paper and have a collection of wonderful prints, vintage wallpaper and books that I use for design inspiration. If you don’t have your own printer at home, just take your favorite print to Staples or Kinko’s and have them print the art work onto photo or t-shirt transfer paper.

For the celadon green silk charmeuse pillow above, I xeroxed images onto the t-shirt transfer paper, ironed them onto cotton and then layered a sheer piece of silk chiffon in the same color green over the image to add some dimension. I find that the photo transfer looks exceptionally well on slightly textured fabric like silk shantung or raw linen. The print takes on some of the texture and looks a little more like silk screen than an iron-on transfer. I was so happy the way it turned out.

Purses

If you are a true do-it-yourselfer and have a good ink jet printer at home remember if you want to transfer words or writing onto fabric you have to set your printer onto the “mirror image” mode so that your words will iron on the fabric correctly. For this blue and white collage pillow, I photo transferred a copy of beautiful old Italian script I found on gift wrapping paper and then incorporated it into a patchwork of linen.

Another idea that I fell in love with was to use a product called FIBER ETCH to create a burn-out effect on silk velvet ( http://www.fabrics.net/etch.asp ).

You apply the liquid with a brush. In this case, I drew simple swirls. Let it dry and then pop the fabric into the dryer. Wherever you paint on the product, it will make the velvet fibers fall out leaving you with a cool etched design. I then photo transferred a page of poetry onto cotton and then layered it under the burned-out silk velvet and sewed it into a pillow. I am thrilled the way the writing and drawings peek through the burned-out or etched-out velvet design. Give one of these DIY home decorating projects a try…and give your small space some big style without cracking open your “nutshell” of a budget.