Painting bedroom window blinds is a fun decorating activity that your children can actually help with and take charge of.  Kids will love this activity and getting them involved with the decorating process will give them a real sense of ownership with how the room turns out.

Most parents have suffered at one time or another from how rapidly our children’s tastes can change.  This can make decorating your children’s bedrooms a bit of a nightmare.  Children love to have their rooms decorated in themes, but if you choose something they grow out of too quickly, the great amount of time, effort and cash you’ve put into decorating can sometimes seem a bit wasted.

One way to get around this problem is to only theme and personalise a few easily changeable areas of the bedroom.  One area that works great for this is a window blind, window blinds are great for personalising as they provide a big area that you or your kids can easily paint on or customize, if you use the pre made variety (available at most DIY shops) they are relatively inexpensive to replace, and if it does all go horribly wrong they only need to be visible at night.

So if you think you’d like to give customising your children’s blinds a go here’s a quick guide:

Equipment:
There are lots of blinds to choose from, roller blinds give you the biggest area to work on but vertical blinds give you lots of separate canvases should you want to divide the work between several children in a shared bedroom.

You can choose to use a blind made from either stiffened fabric or the more papery variety.  Both these kinds will work fine but you need to choose your paint accordingly.

If you are using a fabric blind, then fabric paints are the most obvious choice, however Stencil paints should work on either kind of blind and in fact most other surfaces too.  Stencil paints are also thicker than average paints so will be more resistant to cracking when the blinds are rolled.

Painting the blinds:
If you have older children, or children who particularly enjoy painting you could always just have them free paint the blind, give them a brush and some paints and let their creativity flow, however with younger children a little more planning might not go a miss and you might want to try stencilling, printing or tracing.

If you decide to try stencilling you can either make your own stencils or buy some from craft shops, printing could be done with stamps, or you could even have your children hand or finger paint the blind for some exciting and colourful results.

If your children wants a more detailed design tracing might be the way to go.  Let your children draw their design on paper or even choose one from a photo or magazine, then trace it onto tracing paper and then use carbon paper to transfer it to the blind.  It’s then just a case of painting within your out line.

Caring for your blinds:
Once you’ve got a design your happy with you’ll want to make sure it lasts.  Machine washable blinds painted with fabric paint should still be suitable for machine washing, but if you used stencil paints they are less likely to survive this.  If you painted with stencil paints it’s best to keep your blind clean with warm soapy water and a sponge avoiding the areas that have been painted.

Next time your children’s room is die to be decorated why not get them involved in the task and make the whole process a fun family activity.  Decorating blinds is a lot of fun.

Bio:
This article was provided by Ewan MacDougal on behalf of Interior Goods Direct. If you are thinking of giving this activity a go you could start your blinds research by checking out there range of cheap vertical blinds.