Simple Stencil Tutorial; 1 hour and done!

Okay, so technically this is still from our last house.  I just have a lot to wrap up, so bear with me, I do have some projects from my current house coming up in a week or so. 

Anyway, once upon a time, I started my daughter’s nursery… and I never really finished it.  The end. 

Short and sweet right?

No quite, there were some projects, in the middle of that sentence above, that actually got done and overall the space looked cute when we left.   We did one really fun thing and that was the canopy above her bed. So today I think I will show you how we stenciled the back, and little stencil tutorial if you will! First a quick glimpse is always necessary right?

When we moved in the room looked like this, thanks for the free mattress… not.

When I found out I was pregnant I painted the room, ya know, nesting happens for realz.   I never really loved the color of the walls, but I was about to have a baby, and we didn’t have extra money to repaint at the time. So I never repainted, and four years later we moved, and the walls are still this color!. The walls were a tan and the ceiling was blue with white trim:

I showed you a few times a few of the things I had done for the space.  This is what it looked like with the original crib I had in there and another bed.

The room stayed like this for the first year and a half. Then we had our second daughter Lydia and things started to get rearranged a bit.  First of all, we bought Lydia her own crib, but ultimately decided to switch out the girls cribs because the black one was higher and easier to lay a tiny baby in.   While the new white one was a lot lower and closer to the ground for a climbing toddler. Win/win

And because this is my blog, and I love looking at pictures of my kids.  Here is Etta’ reading  her scriptures, followed by a prayer…!  (No, this wasn’t staged.  I didn’t think it mattered that she was reading it upside down, it was just cute!)

Cuteness!

Once we got the new crib in there I really wanted to change everything around.  I felt like the twin bed was taking up too much extra space, So I moved that out.  And there was nothing else furniture wise, because it all matched Lydia’s black crib so it went into her room.

I really loved these canopy ideas and posted about my goals to install a canopy over her bed.   Something like these, sorry I saved these images 2 years ago, so I don’t have any sources, please let me know if you know where they are from and I will add the link in.

 I decided to test out what I might be able to do with some fabric that I already had. I was thinking of having her start off in this little trundle bed to learn how to sleep in a big girl bed.  And I was just fooling around with ideas of what we could do.  I realized that the amount of fabric I would need for this project, was going to be huge, so I started thinking of alternatives to super expensive amounts of fabric.

I realized stenciling might be a great affordable option.

Stencil Tutorial!

Stencil Your Wall FAST

First thing I decided to do was move the location of her bed. To a new wall.  But her closet door was on this wall and I didn’t want it to steal any of the canopy’s thunder so I grabbed the left over paint rom the walls and painted the closet door and molding the same color as the wall.

Then I started trying to figure out the size and shape I wanted this canopy to be… so I taped up some paper and hung up some scrap fabric…

1. Once I got the look and size that felt right ( I changed it about a year later just FYI, I will show you more about that in the next couple days), I marked the shape of the canopy on the wall, with a pencil.  Then I painted the inner portion of the canopy with white.

(If you are keeping the color of your wall you can skip this step)

Nothing like a helping hand… this one was brought to you by Etta.

The size of the canopy was slightly big for the crib but sized and centered perfectly with a twin sized bed.  I didn’t want to do this twice, when I switched out the crib for a big girl bed, so I planned accordingly the first time.

I decided to use this bowl for my stencil… I know. I am strange.

2. I measured the center of the canopy and the radius of the bowl.  Just in case it has been a while since you took geometry:

3. Then I marked a line on the wall the radius dimension off of center.  So for example if your bowl has an 8” diameter or is 8”across, then 4” is the radius.  Mark the center of the wall then measure 4” from the center (the radius dimension of the bowl) and that is the line you will mark on the wall.  Make sure it is level.  I made a few tiny pencil marks then I taped the line so I could follow along the taped line, with my stencil.

4. To prep the bowl I had to mark a square on the backside of the bowl.  You do want the to be the right size, make sure your paper is square because these will be your registration lines.  Since the bowl I used is a metal bowl, I just marked it with a sharpie, cuz I could scrub it off later.  But please don’t use your grandmothers porcelain, that would be bad. 

5. Then because we already know I am strange I created a handle on the back of he bowl with masking tape.  This made using the bowl really fast and easy, I recommend doing it. 

6. Using a gallon of $5.00 mis-mixed paint and a pizza box, I put a little layer of paint on the box and dipped the rim of the bowl into the paint, you don’t want it dripping.

7. The first stamp of the bowl will go centered either at the top (or bottom) of the wall, aligned with the side of the painters tape line.  Like you can see below.

***TIP – My walls are heavily textured, if your walls are not textured, your lines will be more solid, but I wanted my lines to be organic and painterly, not solid, so this worked really well, and went SUPER FAST!  If you want it to be more solid, you can really gently turn your wrist in place to help the paint spread a little bit more, even on textured walls.  If you have drips  just be sure to wipe them up before they dry.

8. Now all you have to do is work your way down the line, by lining up the top two registration marks with the last stamped circle.  ( I drew the square on the wall in Photoshop so hopefully you can see what I mean)  The arrows are pointing to where you line up the top registration marks.

Okay just follow along the line lining up the top two registration marks and keeping the circles straight with the tape.

9. Once you’ve finished the first line you will be ready to start on the second row, this time you will be aligning these three registration marks.

And you just keep doing that until you finish the patterned potion of the wall.

10. Once you finish one side, pull down your tape and start the process of aligning and stamping the bowl on the other side.

Once you finish the this is what the wall looked like before our next step.  It took me about an hour or so to create a stenciled wall… and I didn’t even have to buy a stencil!  Awesome!

Tomorrow, I will show you how we built the top crown portion of the canopy (is there a name for that I haven’t been able to think of it all day!)  Can you think of it?  But what do you think of this wall stencil tutorial?

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