Home visit: four easy textile ideas to love
Textiles are a fast, easy and affordable way to update the spaces in your home. This season, use them to bring the energy of the season inside. Here are four fun ideas from interiors stylist Ashlyn Gibson to get you started!
Frame your favourites
Affordable art is about more than paint on paper. Make a collection of framed textiles – wrap fabric strips round old frames, mount material in new frames and stretch patterned textiles across artist’s canvas. Then hang for a unique wall display. A tip for covering canvases. Measure your fabric, adding the depth of the frame plus 3cm. Fix fabric to frame with double-sided tape or a glue gun.
Why I love textiles
“I love the colour and vibrancy of textiles. I’m a fan of objects that tell a story and textiles have that storytelling side to them. I used to travel a lot, especially in Asia, and noticed how people make good use of textiles. Fabric screens and Japanese noren – the curtains with a split that are hung on walls, in doorways or to divide rooms. There are so many ways to use fabric,” says Ashlyn.
Make a boho dip-dye mobile
“This is so easy yet it looks so good. I think it’s a great idea for a wedding decoration. We tied strips of fabric round a hoop then dip-dyed the ends and hung it to dry. We took a rustic approach but you could create a more polished finish by cutting the strips rather than ripping them, and washing the fabric before you dye it so it’s more absorbent.”
Tie and dye
To make a boho-style mobile, get a hoop – an embroidery hoop or hula-hoop, like we have here. Pick a fabric to cover the hoop, tear it into strips and wrap round the hoop, overlapping as you go. Tear your main fabric into long, thin strips. Fold each strip in half to create a loop at one end and tie to your hoop by feeding the loose ends of each strip through the loop and pulling tight. Repeat…
You can really magic something up with fabric. It’s affordable, easy to change and can really set the mood in a space.”
Ashlyn Gibson
Unique book covers
Fabric book covers can turn the mishmash of books on your shelves into an eye-pleasing display, or upgrade everyday notebooks to unique party favours to give to guests at the end of a party. Or simply add a personal touch to the book you’ve chosen to use as your travel journal or holiday photo album.
Wrap it up
Lay your fabric out on a flat surface, right side down. Measure how much you need to cover your book (allow a 2cm ‘seam’ at each end so you can fix your fabric in place). Open one cover flat on the fabric and fold the fabric round the cover as if you’re wrapping a present. Fix each side to the book with double-sided tape. For a neater finish, cut the corners on a diagonal.
Mark your page
“For an extra touch, I added a bookmark. Cut fabric a little longer than the length of your book. Fold one end over and stick a square of double-sided tape to it. You want to stick this into the spine of the book. Open the book out and feed the end of your bookmark with the tape into the gap at the top of the spine. Press down so the tape sticks.”
Turn your bed into a luxury sleep space with a bed canopy. This is four metres of fabric with loops sewn to the end so it can be fixed to hooks in the ceiling, then draped back across the ceiling to hang down the wall behind the bed. Fix a curtain pole to the wall near the ceiling and thread the fabric through to make the drape.”
Ashlyn Gibson
We love to see our customers get creative with our products. Go for it! But please note that altering or modifying IKEA products so they can no longer be re-sold or used for their original purpose, means the IKEA commercial guarantees and your right to return the products will be lost.
