We take a ho-hum wall and spice it up with glitter. This tutorial shows what a little hard work and a whole lot of glitter can do to brighten a room. Time lapse pictures show the progress.
Have you ever wanted to use a ton of glitter? Good for you, shine on. We hadn’t until we came up with this amazing glitter wall project that gave us the opportunity to use more glitter than we previously thought humanly possible.
We’ve used metallic paints in the past and our experience is that even with the right tools, it ends up splotchy. The whole technique with applying it just so, on a perfect wall, isn’t going to work out on this room. We needed a way to cover an imperfect wall without it accentuating all the patched picture holes and the waist-height wallpaper border glue mess, which someone painted over.
This tutorial will show you how we glammed up a wall of our own, with only a couple of supplies and a whole lot of sparkle. To glitz up this wall we chose silver champagne colored glitter! You can choose any color you like, just make sure you can get more, if needed. (We needed a lot more than we originally planned and had the store order more.)
We recommend doing this on a smaller wall. The larger the wall, the more supplies you will need to complete the glitter treatment. This could be used on a number of projects like furniture, stencils, artwork, or just dazzling up your pencil holder like we did.
First we tested glitter ratios to adhesive, and figured out whether we wanted to use a gloss medium, or matte. It was our experience that the gloss just pushed the glitter around and the matte gave us the best results in applying glitter to the wall.
We did not paint our wall a similar color as the shade of our glitter. It was a huge mistake and we had extra work to cover the cream wall with our bronzish glitter treatment. It was extra supplies and a whole lot of wasted time.
If you choose to paint your walls first it will just make it easier than what we did! The paint is going to be cheaper than the glitter treatment, so you may choose to cover the area to be glitterized with something closely resembling what you’re working with. Check the oops paint at your local box store or use up something you or a friend already have to save money on this project. If you’re fairly open to colors, check the miss-tinted paints first and select glitter that’s similar. Let all paint dry at least 24-hours before applying the glitter treatment. Gloss paint should be avoided because you want the treatment to have something to grab on to.
Tape off your edges to have clean lines all around your wall. Any blue painters tape will do. This can be a bit time consuming, but if you aren’t super experienced painting at cutting in, this is a crucial step. Cover the floor with plastic because drips on the floor are a real drag. We used a large plastic tablecloth from our dollar store.
Use a larger plastic container with a lid to mix your supplies in. You can seal it up, in case you don’t/can’t use it all at once when it’s mixed up. We used a large recycled cottage cheese container. Anything with a wide opening and a lid would do nicely.
You have the luxury of using our trial-and-error when mixing this beautiful mess. You can use our experience to make your project take very little time and with just a few coats of the glitter treatment.
We used a mixture of: one large bottle of 16oz Matte Mod Podge per 6oz of fine glitter. This was 3-2oz small bottles for our color. Larger bottles are available for many colors, but not ours!
Mix them in your container and get ready to glitter! It should be thick and glittery, but you should easily be able to mix them together. It should easily drip off an overloaded paintbrush. We found that if you add more, in hopes it will go faster, you end up with a thick paste that goes on the wall like wet sand. You want the mixture to have enough bonding agent, so you can paint the wall with it, and not just glue all the glitter together inside the container. Yea, that happened.
We used a large paintbrush to apply the mixture in sections to our wall. Blend the edges, or just plop it on there, it doesn’t really matter at this point. You just don’t want any drips, brush those out. Trying to blend too much was a waste of life, so don’t move the glitter around too much, or you’ll end up with super thin spots. This mixture will roughly cover a three or four foot area with a first coat. You’ll need to mix more as you go and let it dry. When it’s wet, it’s cloudy and pastel, but clear when dry.
Apply enough coats to cover the wall, working in sections, and let it dry between coats. There you have it. That’s how we did it and you can too.
Our glitter wall is finished and beautiful. It was a fairly large wall to apply this to, and it was not as cheap as paint, even metallic, but it was the perfect transformation for the whole room. It’s a great addition to a bright sunny room with its warm-reflective awesomeness.
