Painted Wallpaper

I have done a few painting projects in my day....

Stripes in the little girls' room

 Woodland nursery

and Chevron for the big girls.

In the basement I decided to do an accent wall. I looked up all kinds of ideas and nothing was catching my eye. I thought about wall paper but I can't shop for it here and online is hard. Also it is not cheap and I have never hung wall paper myself. So....I finally found a blog with a cute idea for painted wall paper, and found out a friend of mine had used it with wonderful results so I went for it. The project took lots of time, but was basically free. Awesome. 

Now, I made a lot of mistakes and this was one of the hardest accent walls I have done. First I chose a pearl craft paint which ended up being not right and too translucent. The tutorial says just use a pencil but that paint wouldn't cover it at all. So I tried to erase it. No go. I started tracing and the template was a little off and my first ones were crooked. There is a lot of eyeballing in this. I decided to restart behind the door, and then found some chalk to replace my pencil. I made the mistake of starting from a different part of the wall, and the pattern did NOT meet well in the middle. UGH. So I finally just painted over the pencil, and restarted entirely. I also ended up mixing the pearl paint with some other white paint and it ended up not shiny like I wanted, but still pretty. I probably spent 8 hours on this first series of mess ups. 

I had to rework the template after the one printed from the blog failed, and this one was symmetrical! I had a paper one I could use at the top and bottom of the walls and around corners, and a cardboard one for the rest.

Chalk outline. Tracing this pattern took HOURS and HOURS. I could not believe how long it took. On the bright side, I got some quiet time alone at night with my iPod, but trying to work on it around Calvin's schedule was difficult. Also I had a million things to do to get ready for Sara's birthday and baptism so me sitting in front of this wall all week was bad timing, but we were trying to get done before family arrived (didn't happen). The hardest part was going in order so I didn't mess up again, some I was on a step ladder, some I was sitting on the floor, you kind of have to go in a diagonal pattern and just eyeball it all the way along so you don't make any big mistakes. But you also have to accept little mistakes. There is no "groove" to get into or way to speed it up because each one is relative to the one next to it and above it. I was shocked how sore this old shoulder could feel from just holding up a piece of cardboard. Painting it was a little quicker, but still took quite a while. After days and days of working on it, I could finally wipe off the chalk lines and see the result. I think it is really pretty. I may hate it a little right now but I that's ok. We will make up soon. And I thought the chevron wall was bad.....

 I have some things to hang on the wall and we have baseboards to install but yay for being done!!