Thursday, August 9, 2012

DIY: Accent Wall & Moroccan Stencil

My bedroom has only one window and when I was younger my dad installed built in shelves and a window seat that he made completely by himself, thank you dad! I spent numerous hours of my childhood sleeping, reading and stargazing on that seat and for the past couple of years its just been a home for all of my books and dust... So now that my parents have moved on to Texas and left their two college student daughters and a roommate the house I took it upon myself to completely redo my room. 

First step: 
Get rid off the shelving unit and window seat to make more room and to create an accent wall. 

This is the before picture, this is actually the room next to mine but it looked exactly the same!

AFTER

It completely opened my room up and made for an amazing new accent wall. I am so completely in love with it!

Okay so now that you have seen the window seat and shelves gone as well as the before and after now is the time to tell you about the amazing stencil I used to make this look happen.  I was on Pinterest when I stumbled upon this awesome woman's DIY Moroccan wall on her BLOG. Thank you so much for the inspiration!

First thing's first I searched high and low on Google, I just typed in: Moroccan stencil and found many different kinds but in the end I came to the conclusion that I should just do the first one that I saw on Pinterest. HERE is a picture of the stencil I used from the blog While They Snooze.
I printed the stencil out after enlarging it and just cut the shape out and taped together any other sheets of paper that printed out from the enlargement and then placed it over a piece of cardboard, traced it and then cut that out as well.  I went one step further and went ahead and traced a smaller size of the stencil on the cardboard and traced and cut that out. The reason why I did this was because I wanted to make sure that all of my lines would be the same exact size every time I would trace the stencil on my wall.

So here is the printed paper and the cut out cardboard stencil together and it should pretty much look like this.
I added an extra strip of cardboard along the stencil to make it more sturdy, without the strip it was too flimsy and almost impossible to trace with.

Let's get started!
I started the stencil at the very top corner of my wall and gradually worked my way down, I DO NOT advise you to just start stenciling in the middle of a wall because then you might have partial pieces of the stencil when you get to the edges and corners and it could throw off the look completely.

Here I have already begun stenciling and am just continuing on. Place the cardboard stencil flat against the wall and make the the stencil line up with what you previously had stenciled and painted onto your wall.
Now outline the stencil with a pencil. I first traced the outside of the stencil.
Then I traced the inside of the stencil.
This type of outlining the stencil will insure that the width of the lines your are going to be painting stay the same and it makes painting the that much easier and worry free!
It is hard to see with the color of paint I used but this is what the stencil you traced in pencil should look like.
Now all you have to do is find a paint brush to paint in the stencil, I painted with a white paint I found in the garage. I would go over with one coat of paint and then the second coat of paint with a smaller tip paint brush to even out the edges as needed.

Alright, so you're going to come across stenciling at a corner or where you want to stencil to end but the cardboard stencil is just not going to be flexible enough, that is why you still need to have the printed out stencil.
All you have to do is line up the paper with the painted stencil on the wall and trace around it then eyeball where the second smaller line should be. 

This is the right wall in progress.
This is the left wall already completed.

This project took a lot of work because you are stenciling this on your wall by hand and completely from scratch but in the end it is so worth it and during the process of stenciling you get to kind of take your mind of things and relax while you're stenciling.

I only did the two opposite walls and not the complete wall with the window because I thought it would look too busy and all I did was just let the stencil wrap around the corner a little bit on both sides so it didn't look like I cut it off. If you're wondering what color I painted my wall before I started with the stencil it was originally yellow just like the rest of my room but I painted it a purple color on the accent wall. It's called Smoked Mulberry by Valspar that I got at my local Lowe's Home Improvement store. It looks beautiful with the remaining yellow walls and stencil.

This whole project took about 6 days and cost me only $30 for the Smoked Mulberry Valspar paint.

Enjoy and Have fun!








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