Easy Fabric Cover for Wire Shelves in My Country Guest Room




Happy New Year, everyone!

In this first post of the New Year, I thought I'd share a fun, easy DIY project that I did a few months ago.  A fabric cover for a cheap, wire shelving unit.  Very little sewing required.

First, some background.  My smaller guest bedroom in the country was painted green when I bought the house, and it is one of the few rooms in the house that I haven't re-painted.  I like the green.  I found a really cute comforter at Target last year that looks great in the room. 


Also last year, I bought wire shelves for the kitchen (they were about $50 at Lowes) but then soon thereafter upgraded to nicer wood shelves.  I didn't want to get rid of the wire shelves so needed somewhere to put them, at least temporarily, while I decided what to do with them.  They ended up in the green bedroom.  Not too attractive. 



Then one day the thought suddenly came to me, hmm, what if I made some sort of fabric cover for the shelves, so that I could leave them here in the room and use them for storage??   

I considered buying a fabric in a complementary color/pattern, but then at Target (yay, Target!!) I found the perfect thing.  A reversible comforter cover that matched the comforter I had already bought.  It had the two different patterns, and I could use the smaller print pattern that is less prominent on the bed as the main fabric for the shelves and the bigger print that is more prominent on the bed as trim for the shelves.

I did the project pre-blog, so I didn't do a very good job at taking photos along the way or really keeping track of exactly what I was doing.  But, basically, I  rolled the edges back so that the comforter would fit around the shelves, tacked down the edges with iron-on tape, wrapped it around the shelves, sewed it to the top of the shelves, and then made the piece to go on the very top, taking care to center the pattern.  
I added ties to make it look more finished and to keep it closed.  The very happy accident was that the pattern on the two front trim pieces matches exactly, as you can see in the photo below, which I took before I put the top piece on it. 

  
The matching was purely an accident.  Don't you love when that happens? 

And here it is shown with the panels open, so that you can see the contrasting fabric inside (thanks to the fact that the comforter cover was reversible).


I'm so happy with how it came out.  I use the shelves to store fabric - fittingly!