Ikat Experimentation: Our Finished Closet

Last week I began experimenting with the interior of my closet. I planned a DIY ikat pattern that wouldn’t require the use of a stencil, and would be totally f-r-e-e with leftover paint. (You can read that intro post right here.)

It quickly went from looking iffy to looking very cool, as I plotted around the inside of the closet creating abstract diamond-esque patterns with a 1/2″ artist’s paint brush and some leftover Burnished Bronze paint (Behr brand, the same color that I use in the hallway just outside the room).

I took it a little further than I had shown last week, realigning the tape once the first layer had dried and carefully painting more diamonds in the white space left behind. It was looking good. And if I may say, the gold and the hardwoods are like PB+J; I love how the two colors play up each other.

Over the course of 3 days, working a few hours at a time, I made my way slowly around the room while simultaneously clearing off my DVR (I somehow tape way more than I can humanly keep up with, but am loving the new Live! With Kelly + thought M-W last week with Jerry Seinfeld was awesome).

I digress. The painting project was reasonably easy, although I think that has a lot to do with the fact that it was purposely imperfect, like any traditional ikat fabric; if I had been more exacting and detail-oriented (like when I painted the stairs) it probably would have taken me a week. There are actually lots of “flaws”, such as lines of different length and heavier/lighter paint areas, but most of those imperfections vanish when you step back and look at the whole wall at once.

If you didn’t know any better, you might even think that the closet was wallpapered.

The next planned step of the process had been to fill in the middle white area with another color, a combination of grays and gray-blues to complement the Pebble Rug and gray walls of the bedroom. Much like the diamonds themselves, I didn’t see this being a consistent application, looking more like splotches and splashes of color more than something meticulously applied. I started with a test area that’s hidden just to the inside right of the doorway. And I’m glad I did…

Because it didn’t look as nice as I thought it would.

It was just… sloppy. I tried harder by making the gray and blue colors bigger, covering all of the white area, which seemed OK in photographs but still weird in real-life; not nice enough to make me want to do the whole closet that way. It took the surface from looking like pseudo-wallpaper to more so like a hand painted crafty. Pete pointed out that it would have looked more natural if the middle color was painted first, and the gold was then painted around it. Agreed, but too late unless I wanted to start over, which I did not.

So in the end, we’ve left it with the gold pattern, no other colors. With our closet once again filled (my blouses and Pete’s 152 pairs of jeans), it looks nice. Not too overwhelming (which was another concern during the process) but a nice little detail that we’ll see daily.

Most of the time, the closet’s totally hidden. We have that roller blind from IKEA serving as a door, and it’s a perfect fit. (What, you just noticed I don’t have a closet door? I know, sometimes it feels like a college dorm.)

If anyone else attempts an ikat paint project, do share! I’d love to see your interpretation!