DIY Colorful Raindrop Decals {Nursery Accent Wall}

Several things happen when you sit nursing a baby for any great length of time.

1. You begin wondering if you’d be able to walk to the kitchen and get the eggless cookie dough out of the fridge without breaking baby’s latch.
2. You get an overwhelming urge to check and make sure your boob is still intact.
3. You begin daydreaming about how you could improve the space in which you are nursing.

This, my friends, is how Kenley’s sweet and colorful raindrop accent wall was born. Terrible pun completely intended.

The owner of the room approves and I’ve caught her studying her raindrops on a few occasions. When it was time to take her picture, though, she was more interested in studying the camera.

One of my favorite parts about this wall is that it is completely reversible: the raindrops are made out of adhesive vinyl. Which means that I could rearrange them every day into random shapes like a pancreas, or a squirrel, or a squirrel’s pancreas, if I was so moved. Luckily for you and the squirrel I’d need to bring to an untimely demise in order to know what a squirrel’s pancreas looks like, I am not so moved.

I did some much-needed stash-busting and used up all of the white and green vinyl that I had on hand, and then ordered the colored vinyl on eBay. I made the raindrop template on my Cricut and then pushed a button and went and did other things while my Cricut did all of the work for me. Yes, you could probably cut out 200 raindrops shape by hand with little to no whining and drama, but to be honest I’d rather pursue that squirrel and his pancreas.

When it was time to put them up, I did the white ones first, leaving space randomly between them for the colored ones. I did a fair amount of rearranging to get the colored ones where I wanted them—not too close to another one of the same color, evenly distributed across the wall, avoiding any sort of predictable pattern, etc. Organized chaos is my specialty.

When there were only a handful of spaces left, I used scraps of vinyl as placeholders so I could figure out how many more raindrops of certain colors I needed to cut out.

As far as measuring goes, there was a TON. And by a TON I mean a ton of none. (Recall my use of the word chaos.) I just started sticking the raindrops up there and eyeballed the distances between them. It’s imperfect, but no raindrop ever claimed to fall equidistant from its neighbor…possibly because the word equidistant is above a raindrop’s primitive vocabulary. This system worked because I could stick, stand back, and adjust when necessary. I might have had to be a responsible math-favoring adult if I’d been using a stencil and paint.

Overall, the wall makes Kenley’s nursery my hands-down favorite room in the house, and in my opinion its sweetness is exceeded only by the sweetness of the room’s primary occupant.

Total cost for the project: $12 and change for the colored vinyl. Total time on task: probably three or four hours uninterrupted by that cute little face. This project was definitely more time-consuming than it was difficult.

Have you ever made anything with adhesive vinyl? Who wants to hire Kenley to model their projects? Who wants to share my eggless cookie dough? On second thought, I don’t know if I am willing to share my baby or that cookie dough. Offers retracted.

Psst…you can see the rest of Kenley’s nursery here.

 

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