Stenciling Walls

We’re having a pretty low-key holiday weekend over here.  Doing a few household repairs, thinking about upcoming birthday parties, cleaning the garage, playing Barbies, wondering how it is that our little girls are growing up so fast and trying to figure out how to freeze time.

So…since you’re probably not so interested in the repair job on the dishwasher or why our well randomly stops pumping water up to the house…I thought I’d share some stenciling that I did in Addie’s room.   Did I ever tell you how we painted her room before she was born and we didn’t know if we were having a boy or a girl?  That would have been all fine and normal if we’d gone with a nice gender neutral room, but I really wanted to do a pink and dark brown room.  We *knew* we would probably have a third little princess so we just planned as such.  You know me, I’ve got to have a plan.  So I wanted to experiment with some sort of wall treatment and I came across Cutting Edge Stencils.  Sure, I thought!  That’s perfect – I’ll slave away at stenciling a whole wall in pink and brown and certainly I won’t mind if we have a boy and I have to paint over the whole thing.  (Good thing that all worked out, huh?)

So anyway, I gave it a try.  I used this stencil here,  and do you know what?  It really wasn’t too difficult and I think the finished effect is incredible.  We divided the wall and painted off the bottom 2/3 a nice rich brown.  We painted the top 1/3 (and the rest of the room) a soft pink.  Painting one damask patch at a time, I simply taped up the stencil, aligning the pattern with the previous patch, and rolled a nice wet roller over it.  It was a pretty quick process, except that I waited between each patch for the previous one to dry.  But I just did a quick patch, then carried on doing other things in the house, then came back every 30 min. or so over the course of the day.  As I went along, I discovered two important things that resulted in the cleanest stenciled image.  1.  Quicker is better.  and 2.  More paint on the roller is better.  That is, if I tried to use less paint on the roller and apply a lot of pressure to fill in the whole stencil, I found that the paint smudged and bled under the stencil.  But, if I got the roller really wet with paint and then just went over the stencil with ONE stroke, the finished product was much cleaner.  The differences in the stenciling across the wall blend together smoothly and I felt no need to touch up any of the more smudged images.  In fact, I think the variation adds character to the wall.  We finished with a strip of chair rail, a shelf, and very small crown molding around the room.

Unfortunately, the original ceiling color would not work with the new paint and we gambled on painting it the same pink as the rest of the room.  Not so good.  The room kind of has this pink glow to it, but I just can’t get motivated to spend a day painting a ceiling – not my idea of a good time, so poor Addie has to live in the pink glow.  I’ll get around to that ceiling soon, I’m sure of it…