How to Create a Vintage Rainbow Home Decor Display

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Let’s put our vintage decor in rainbow order for pride month! Vintage items by themselves are great but putting them in color order can have a huge impact. It makes you decorate in a different way too when you only focus on color which can be a fun exercise.

I was so inspired years ago by Elsie Larson’s Rainbow Bookshelves that I started doing rainbows all over my house! Here’s how I do it.

Shop for easy to find colorful items

Start by thrifting really easy to find items in the colors you’re looking for. This can include vintage or newer books, all that matters is the color. Look for vintage records and focus on the artwork and color only. Thrift for vintage bowls and mugs of all shapes and sizes. Check out this blog post for ideas 10 Cheap and Common Vintage Thrift Store Items.

Organize your vintage decor by color

Pull out your decor and sort each item by color. Seeing all your decor in piles by color can be very inspiring and spark a bunch of ideas for how you’ll decorate.

If you’re nervous about adding color to your home check out my blog post on Easy Ways to Create a Colorful Vintage Interior.

Get every color of the rainbow for your vintage collection

If you have a vintage collection, sort them by color and see if there are certain ones that are missing. I have a vintage tin collection and I quickly realized that I have very few purple tins. So now whenever I’m at a flea market I know to keep an eye out for purple tins.

I also started collecting vintage Fire King mugs and I’m hoping to create a rainbow out of them. I didn’t pay attention to the colors and realized I had 3 oranges and no blue or green mugs. Don’t make my mistake and pay attention to what colors are missing in your collection.

If you don’t have a collection yet, you should start one! Read my post on 25 Affordable Vintage Pieces to Start a Collection to get some ideas.

Make the rainbow colors obvious

Whenever I do a rainbow display and it looks “off” it’s because the colors aren’t bold and obvious. Sometimes vintage items are faded or there’s multiple colors in one item so the “blue” section isn’t screaming BLUE.

You can fix this by stacking items on top of each other. Put a Pyrex bowl upside down as a stand and then put a vintage thermos on top. The more items of one color you stack together, the more apparent the color section will be (Pictured above). To see further examples of creating a base layer in your displays check out this blog post Shelf Styling Tips for Vintage Items.

Add a garland for color impact

Another way to make the rainbow colors really obvious is to add a rainbow garland. I did this using Candyland cards and mini clothespins. You could do this with collecting vintage playing cards in color order, seed packets or greetings cards (Pictured above). You can find more ideas on my blog post for creating your own garland.

Or you can buy a ready to use rainbow garland which makes it super easy! There are a ton of cute options online.

Decorate horizontal, vertical or diagonal

Don’t be afraid to play around with the rainbow. I’ve done rainbow displays going in all different directions. I first did a rainbow display vertically on my big green rainbow shelf. Then I did it horizontally with my rainbow record gallery wall. And lastly, this year I did a diagonal rainbow display with my tins.

Customize your rainbow

You don’t have to decorate in just ROYGBIV. You can decorate in a vivid rainbow or a pastel rainbow. Maybe you hate the color purple and you want to exclude it. Do you want to include pink in your rainbow? A few years ago I didn’t have enough orange items so I replaced orange with pink. Now I have plenty of orange items since I’ve started collecting rare Orange Bird collectibles (Like the mug above). Get creative and make your own custom rainbow!

Alright that’s how I go about creating vintage rainbow displays in my home. I hope you found this helpful and if you need any advice, remember you can always book a one on one call with me! I offer virtual interior design consultations so we can get your home looking exactly how you want. Thanks for reading my blog!