Poor Man’s UO Picture Ledge

Use a glue gun to make fake wrought iron flowers. Then apply them to any shelf, floating or not, broad or narrow. That’s it, tutorial over.

Above are the shelves at my daughters desk. Not the prettiest. The brackets were added recently because the shelves dipped and taking anything down again for painting was going to cause hassles, so I decided to prettify them as they were, making this a project a bored teenager could do in an afternoon without having to haul out screw-drivers and drills.

These shelves needed some extra care so I masked them off and painted them with chalk paint first but you could use ready-made, pre-painted ones if you are not applying this idea to existing shelves.

I drew a simple flower design with all the parts touching each other somewhere. Plan the size of the design to fit the size of the shelves because if they are too big they may be too impractical. Obviously this is not nearly as sturdy as metal but hot glue is reasonably robust provided you don’t accidentally hook something to a flower and then yank.

Using a take-away lid like the one pictured below sprayed lightly with non-stick spray, I placed the design under the plastic and then used my glue-gun to draw the shapes out. You can also do row of them, all touching, this will make sticking them much easier because you won’t have to stick each one individually. Make enough to go around the edge of your shelf. They are easily pulled off from the plastic.

Since I didn’t use black glue, I had to spray paint my shapes. I was concerned that the non-stick spray would interfere with the paint, perhaps I was just lucky but it didn’t. If you were concerned about this, first thoroughly wash and dry your shapes.

Once dry, starting at one end of the shelf, I stuck a row of shapes down with contact adhesive. I made sure that the contact adhesive was nice and tacky but I had to use painters tape to keep some in place.

These shelves are used to display a collection of some scary looking anime themed objects but for my sanity I choose my battles carefully.😏

For comparison, here is the Urban Outfitters one- very nice but I hardly spent a cent on mine.