Fun with Contact Paper

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When the weather is not very friendly outside it's good to have some things to do inside. In elementary school it was called a "rainy day schedule" meaning that we couldn't go outside to play which we were always bummed about but that we could play board games and the like in our classroom. While this wasn't exactly appealing I was often surprised how it ended up being quite fun and how we still didn't want recess (in any form) to end.

Now that I'm big I have several options of things to keep me busy when doing much of anything outside would not be great fun. I had been thinking about it for quite a while so it was fun to take a morning and do it.

I decorated my living room wall with stylized dandelion fluff. I cut the shapes out of white contact paper (shelf/drawer liner) then applied them to the wall making sure that a few of the seeds were visible through the floating frames that hold a couple of our wedding pictures.

Using contact paper to make wall decals is a very affordable DIY alternative to vinyl transfers. It was it's drawbacks, for instance it's harder to evenly space letters if your putting up words although it can still be done, I feel the MUCH lower price of the contact paper outweighs any hassles.

And of course because no decorating post would be complete without a dreary before picture complete with bad lighting-- like the infomercials that make the most ordinary tasks (like washing your car) back breaking work. Oh, the jars of tomato sauce on the dining room table were being used as paperweights to hold the contact paper nice and flat.

Here is a close up of one of the seeds. The toys in front is part of the collection of toys we found while working in the garden.

I made a stencil to make things go faster and so each one would be roughly the same size and shape. I flipped the stencil over so the stems weren't all curving the same direction because that would look weird.

So as I'm just about finished sticking them to the wall I'm pretty jazzed and I call my sister to share my jazz-ed-ness. She likes to do projects and I knew she could relate to how I was feeling with almost being done and happy with the results. "That's been around for, like, two years" wasn't the response I was expecting. So yeah, while the idea is not entirely new, mine look different, I like them, they make me happy, I did it in one morning and it cost me 50 cents in materials.