Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Star Wars Bedroom

When it was time for my 9 year old son to get a "bigger boy" room of his own, I immediately knew we should go for a classic Star Wars theme! We had a great collection of the 70s and 80s Star Wars toys we had collected over the years, but he wasn't interested in really playing with them any more.

I'm a huge Star Wars fan myself, and I really enjoy sharing this interest with my boys. I wanted the room to by playful, but not childish. The room was a pale green, and I was not able paint it - so we had to work with that. My son fell in love with this orange comforter one day at Target, so our colors were picked! I was lucky to find the two saucer chairs at the local Good Will and the Chevron Rug at Walmart, which made the room super low budget.

Make Your Own Art
I love the idea of creating your own art and was looking for ways to make that happen in our Star Wars Bedroom. We did that in three different ways: Frame portraits of my son dressed up as Star Wars characters and two different toy displays: the character terrariums and the vehicle strip.

Displayed Toys: 
Character Terrariums
We decided to depict our favorite scenes from the original Star Wars trilogy in terrariums. We started by laying out all our characters to see who we had and what resources we could use. We used different mediums for each terrarium, and completely just used what we had on-hand. Like epsoms salts for the snow on Hoth, sand for Tatooine, lichen for the Dagoba swamp and black painted rocks and glitter for Death Star. I was SO happy to use an old pickle and candle jar for two of the terrariums (that totally justified my jar collection), but we needed a few bigger jars too that I ended up buying at Target. My son helped was completely involved in the creation of the terrariums and it was a great lesson in construction and physics... plus we had a good laugh. 
This idea was inspired by the book World of Geek Craft.
A Rebel boarding ATAT Walker on Hoth -  R2D2 and C3PO lost on Tatooine
"Luke, I am your father..." - Yoda teaches Luke how to use the force
Displayed Toys: 
Vehicle Strip
I had a great collection of Star Wars vehicles and envisioned a way to display them, where he could also pull them off and play. But they are all large toys, so they need to be store up the wall. We cut a 2"x4" to be about 6' long and paint it orange. We picked the coolest looking vehicles from the collect and used screws to hold them in place, but didn't ruin the toy and made it way to remove. The display is a nice use of vertical space in the room, don't you think?

Posters
The funnest part of the project was our "Photo Shoot". My son dressed up in his best (and only) suit and borrowed a variety of Dad's ties. Super cute, right? Well then we topped it off with our collection of Star Wars masks... and the result was awesome-ness! We chose the ties and different knots to go with the character, of course Darth Vader needed a red power tie with a Windsor Knot.

I had them printed at Walgreens, with a kind of Andy Warhol effect, in large poster sizes and used a Retail Me Not coupon to bring the price down to about $14 each. I picked up simple poster frames at Target and Walmart to finish them off.

Purchased Art
We had one more wall to fill and I found these great vintage pop art prints on Etsy for only $40 for all three. They incorporated the orange and green colors for the room and were a nice addition. The dresser is a $20 garage sale redo that I refinished with a neutral grey, that will fit in any room.

I could not be happier with how the room turned out and I hope it will last him for many years.

Get the look:


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