DIY Fabric Wall Mural...

A while back I came across a world map mural that I loved and I knew exactly where to hang it - in Cannon's room. I didn't pull the trigger for almost three weeks and by the time I was ready it was gone. I called the company and begged for them to find one in a warehouse somewhere, but they had nothing for me.

I was convinced that I wanted a large mural map to sit on the wall behind the crib.

I searched high and low and I couldn't find anything I liked as well as the one that slipped from my hands. So I improvised.

I decided to iron fabric to my walls. Yes, you read that right...iron. I've used pellon before in craft projects and it worked like a breeze. I was hopeful that I could get it to stick to my orange peel texture walls and it worked just like I had hoped.

I started out by laying out the wall to scale on my computer. (Anyone that reads this blog long enough will know that I always draw everything to scale on the computer first!) When I knew how large I wanted to make it, I carefully laid the countries in their final size out on a banner to be printed at staples.


I took some time and cut out each country. I picked out my fabric for each country, attached the pellon and then traced the country on to the pellon and cut out. It's a little monotonous to cut out the detail of every country twice - but it seemed like the best route at the time. Now that I own a projector, I would probably just trace it using the projector which would save at least one session of cutting out countries!


Once the countries are cut out, pull back the pellon and tape them to the wall for placement.


With a warm iron, slowly run the iron over the fabric and make sure to get all the edges.

The pellon attaches nicely to the wall and can just as easily be removed. I did learn this the hard way as my son's crib was next to the wall and while he was in his crib he liked to pull the edges on one of the countries. The good news is I found out it doesn't leave a residue!

It was apparent I needed to move the crib and we haven't had any problems since. I love the statement that it makes and it was a fraction of the cost of the original map mural I had my eye on.