DIY Shadow Box Wall Decor

This was a simple project. After seeing the shadow boxes on Restoration Hardware with the sea fans, I was inspired. The first step was trying to find a square shadow box – enter the IKEA RIBBA frame. The only other major things I needed were some decorative organic pieces that I could spray paint, and some fabric for the background.

My collection after taking a walk around the neighborhood.

An IKEA shopping bag comes in handy when spray painting.

The plan was to create two shadow boxes. One with a dark fabric background with a light/white colored decor piece. The second box would have a light colored background with a black display piece. Here are the semi-finalist decor items.

After seeing how the pieces turned out after being spray painted (also considering the size and how decorative they are) here are the final two pieces.

Here is the fabric choice. There is the off white canvas style fabric which I had lying around. The grey one was hard to come by. A) I didn’t want to spend a whole bunch on it (men’s suit fabric comes at a high price), and B) I didn’t want there to be any pattern (which a lot of them have) or any shine. I ended up finding this piece in a luxury fabric shop in the scrap basket.

The next step was cutting a piece of cardboard to stick the fabric to.

The board and fabric cut and glued together.

The back of the organic pieces were a bit odd. I ended up gluing a strip of fabric into the crevices and glued the other end to the fabric board.

And that’s it. I stuck with basic colors black/white for the custom DIY shadow box designs, but am curious to know how colorful versions of this would look like. Here are some close ups.