Ceiling Decorated With Fabric

by Bertha
(Denver, CO)

This is a picture of some temporary fabric "wallpaper" I did on a rental I had in college. I hated staring at a white ceiling all day, but we were not allowed to make any decorative changes.

This technique involves using liquid cornstarch (found in the laundry aisle) as wallpaper glue – it is very sticky, but washes clean with water and leaves no stains.

For the “wallpaper,” I used some fabric I found on sale. It is important to get very thin fabric (about the thickness of a sheet) so it is not too heavy for the cornstarch to hold up.

I chose the square design with cool colors, because the color pattern matched the rest of my décor, and the squares offset the pretty ugly ceiling light that I could not replace.

I had done the trim of the room in the same fabric, so it matched and accented very well. I ended up having to cut the piece of fabric into four, because it was too hard to get up in one piece by myself. Wet things do not stick to ceilings very well; next time I do this I will definitely have someone help me!

It was very helpful to have a small paint roller to roll the cornstarch on and smooth out the air bubbles that formed under the fabric – I put the cornstarch on first, then laid the fabric, then went over it again with cornstarch. It looked very nice, and came down very easily when I had to move out.

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