Garden Bedroom on a Budget
By Kathleen Wilson
My youngest daughter has a garden bedroom, and it's my favorite room in the house. More than once after a long day I've been found rocking in a chair in her room surrounded by sunny yellow walls, floating clouds, blooming flowers and happy butterflies. She's only 2, but I hope she likes it as much as I do!
Getting started is easy. Just picture the garden you dream about in your mind, simplify it, and make it happen! The first thing I always do is bring out the paints, and painting a garden on the walls is much easier than it sounds. Paint the wall a background color that matches your moodblue, yellow, pink, light green, and lavender all evoke a garden light. First, consider stencils. You can find small ones with blossoms and leaves at craft stores for less than a buck, you can cluster the flowers for larger designs, and tape off any part of the stencil you don't like. Then simply paint stems freehand with a brush and slightly thinned paint. After it dries, you can add more depth to leaves and stems by highlighting a little with some off white paint, just touch a little line on the edges where the light would realistically hit, here and there.
Another way to add painted flowers is with stamps, again, just freehand the stems. I like to add some painted fencing, a wide foam brush with thinned paint makes a great rustic look. Again, because the foam brush gives you relatively straight edges, you can just freehand it. Foam brushed are very cheap at the crafts store. You could also mask off your fence, and even an arbor behind the bed!
I like to keep the flowers together in clusters, for example, a group of sunflowers, then a group of roses, then some hollyhocks. Of course, you can repeat the groups, but it looks more cohesive than sprinkling the different flowers through randomly.
For a 3-d effect, consider cutting blossoms from felt, layer several together, then push a colored tack through the center to hold it to the wall, and also be the center of the flower! You can also use the felt flower idea to sew flowers to a comforter, curtains, or even dress up their furniture with a glue gun! When sewing, use leftover buttons as the centers. Felt is cheap, and you can use scraps!
If you are really ambitious, paint the ceiling blue and rag some clouds on with an old rag and some craft paint.
Finally, add some garden accessoriesterra cotta pots for dresser top storage, a piece of lattice as a display board, make some simple wood planters for bookshelves, let your imagination travel to the outdoors!
Copyright 2002 K. Wilson
