apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Probably the least expensive wall decor is paint.

Get a couple of colors, some brushes, some painters tape and get creative.

My boyfriend and I have high ceilings and blank walls in our bedroom, also. Recently we bought an eight foot long swath of patterned fabric from Marimekko and hung it along the wall above the bed with stabilizing rods threaded into the top and bottom to help it drape nicely. We think it looks great!

Over bed lights, a piece of material in a block color to add interest, or paint or wallpaper a board for color/texture/pattern, various sizes of pictures. or good old cork board to start building a collarge memories together.

My girlfriend and I took the liner notes from a CD (Lemon Jelly's Lost Horizons) to an art shop and blew it up onto poster-sized, then mounted it on the back of a giant piece of foam-board we found. It's followed us to four different apartments and now we buy other bedroom items to match the sunset colors and blues in the print.

If you live anywhere near an art college go there, wander around, find something you like, and make an offer. I've got a group of 4-5 small paintings in my bedroom - none of them cost over $100. I keep adding to them, filling in with simply framed photos, snippets of graphic designs I like etc. You can build up a really beautiful and personal collage for really not a lot of money.

Maybe a few floating shelves? That way you rotate displays like knick knacks, photos, flowers etc. (Just remember to find wall studs to not have them crashing down on your head in the middle of the night!)

How about just a simple, but large, wooden frame wrapped with a bold printed fabric? Or picture ledges to easily swap out framed photos?

I am shocked! Shocked I tell you, that there haven't been suggestions about wall decals and rasterbator (considering how much AT seems to love both of those things).

Rasterbator=super cheap
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

wall decals=super easy, cheap-ish. There's http://store.dvider.com/ and http://www.whatisblik.com/walldecals.html and there are some on etsy. Frankly, if you type wall decal into the AT search you will find endless posts about wall decals.

Not, DIY enough for you, paint, whittle, pick up a copy of ReadyMade.

Make your own starburst Mirror: or three

buy a circle mirror from the craft store and buy a floral ring from the fake flower department same size or smaller than your mirror. using a glue gun secure the ring to the back of the mirror in the center. get some wooden dowels (1/4 inch thick) break them into varying sizes and glue in a circular pattern to the floral ring so that the smooth end extends outward past the mirror. turn it over and glue tiny mirrors (varying sizes work best) to the dowels around the larger circle mirror in the center. and hang!

the cost is about 30 $ and you can paint the dowels if you want for extra color. It takes about 20 min to make and its super cool looking, plus you can beam with pride when you tell all your friends "oh that? I made it."

i would buy a yard of fabric with a cool print and stretch it over a large canvas or piece of wood and hang it.


http://www.tonicliving.com/productsDetails.asp?categoryid=29&productid=751¤tpage=1&onsale=0

http://www.reprodepot.com/mk54476880.html

http://www.tonicliving.com/productsDetails.asp?categoryid=26&productid=695¤tpage=1&onsale=0

http://www.tonicliving.com/productsDetails.asp?categoryid=29&productid=737¤tpage=2&onsale=0

http://www.fabric.com/ProductDetail.aspx?ProductID=02f5f1f8-8fa3-47ac-852a-c03bcfdc60c5

how about stripes on that one wall that match the colors of your bedsheet. I love this wall and will be doing something similar to my bedroom.
http://images.google.ca/imgres?

imgurl=http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/images/uploads/10-17-stripe3.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/fall-colors-2007-east/22-kathryn-daniels-bright-stripes-big-city-034288&h=307&w=460&sz=34&hl=en&start=168&um=1&tbnid=jOGOckM_lB3UsM:&tbnh=85&tbnw=128&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dhorizontal%2Bpaint%2Bstripes%26start%3D160%26ndsp%3D20%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

you could also just stretch some marimekko fabric. I didn't mention it earlier because it's expensive as all get out, but I looked back a couple of pages and saw that there was apost about it being on sale here: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/sf/fabric-textiles/marimekko-sale-at-always-mod-055615 and here: http://reprodepot.com/allmait.html

RASTORBATE! frameing the individual sheets will "echo" the grid pattern in your bedding. You can then update the photo as often as you like.

another idea... you could frame a sheet of wrapping paper in a cool print in a large ikea ribba frame

http://sprouthome.stores.yahoo.net/noname1.html

http://shop.broadwaypaper.com/browse.cfm/4,7704,95.htm

http://shop.broadwaypaper.com/browse.cfm/4,5756,95.htm

http://www.papermojo.com/contemporary/elum designer prints.html

i <3 lemon jelly!

Thanks everyone for your awesome ideas. I was really interested in Blik's prose wall graphics... and then I remembered these cool aluminum letters I saw in a restaurant once. They're about 10 inches tall, with that brushed metal finish. Does anyone know where to find them? And are they outrageously expensive? I requested a price quote from Blik for a simple phrase, but haven't heard back yet.

This is a fantastic site for all price points:
http://www.20x200.com/

walldecorshops.com has some great (and not so great) wall murals. check out the bamboo mural on page 63 of the most recent CB2 catalogue.

Stretch any cool fabric over a wood frame - I did it, and it looks awesome! Got the frame from http://store.txtlart.com/. The staple gun was a hand-me-down from my father in law.

If you want to make fabric look like a painting, buy wooden stretcher strips for canvas at an art supply store, put them together and either use the little wooden pieces or a staple gun to lock them in place. Then stretch the fabric over that. They come in all sizes, in 1" increments.

If you're into fabric, another option is to hang a wooden curtain rod on the wall and drape different fabrics or costumes over it, as the mood hits you. You could paint the rod and brackets to match the wall - not a good practice if you have vintage textiles but fine to hold a flea market find. You can also find white metal curtain rods on line, if you look hard, or get a length of lucite dowling cut to size.

Invest in a staple gun. Just one of those things you need in life.

We recently took several National Geographic maps and hung them up with binder clips for a quick and super cheap wall decoration. We can flip the map over when we get tired of one side!

I am all for the rasterbator. I took a picture from deviantart and increased the size to 15 8.5 x 11 sheets (3 high by 5 wide) and bought 15 floating clip frames from michael's at 3.95 each. what a great look. for a total of about $100 I have a huge piece of art that I can change for just the price of printing.

Love your comments. I'm a reporter working on a story for a national publication about how to make/buy inexpensive wall art.
If you can chat about your project, please e-mail merce@aol.com. No anonymous e-mails, please. I'll need to quote you by name.