LOST in the Trees

Or a more appropriate title might be: "Where You Can Find Me For The Next Two Weeks"

Recently (and by recently I mean 9 weeks ago) we ordered and received the all over Birch Forest stencil from Cutting Edge Stencils. Our plan for it was stencil one wall in our stairwell and maybe somewhere else. Well that somewhere else has now turned into my studio. In fact we haven't even touched that wall in the stairwell. Matt thought it would be a good idea to practice up on some stenciling somewhere less obvious and so that's what I'm doing.



Thanks to some free paint I won back around the holidays from a DIY Club contest, and some left over off the shelf white paint my studio is getting some long overdue attention. I started off with moving everything over to one side of the room, filled and sanded any holes and got to painting.



A little bright right??? The paint is Wow Power from Dutch Boy in their baking soda infused Refresh paint. Quick rant coming up, I'm not too impressed with this paint. Sure it doesn't smell, but it doesn't cover real well either. I didn't really think to do a coat of primer with paint being so awesome these days and the previous wall color was just dirty white. But once I move on to the other side I will. The problem is the scuff marks on the wall. This paint just will not cover them up. I even applied extra blobs on the ones I could see and they still showed through after 4-6 coats. Maybe the light nature of the color is the problem, but even our greys from the Olympic line at Lowes covered better than this. Ok, I'm done. How much can you really bitch about free paint. what was I saying, oh year it's bright! That's ok. I planned on doing the stenciling in white to tone things down. I taped up my stencil in the corner (maybe not the best decision because folding that plastic into corners is quite difficult) to get started.



I followed most of the instructions from the videos that they suggested on the information sheet that came in the package (here and here). I skipped the blotting on a paper towel thing because we were out of paper towels and that just seems like it would make it take longer. I did however press really hard on the paper plate while loading up my roller so I wouldn't have any visible paint globs on my roller.



It worked pretty well although maybe the paper towel thing is more important that I initially thought. Or maybe I was just pressing too hard sometimes. The bleeding is pretty minimal, nothing that a little bit of touching up cant fix. This is how much I got done in about 7 hours or so.



Thankfully I had my little new little piggy friend I picked up at West Elm this weekend and the Missy Elliott Pandora station to keep me company. Oh and thats not how much the trees bleed. I have been trying to figure out how to use Matt's DSLR and was getting a little fancy with aperture settings.



And speaking of picking things up at West Elm, Matt found this awesome chandiler while I was meeting a local Denver maker/blogger Taradara. We scored this chandiler for a measly $80 down from $300. At first we thought it was just for the floor sample, but when we went up to check out they had brought out a fresh one still in the box and all. Btw I looked online and it's still priced at $239.



Oh, and while I was writing up this post I noticed that we didn't have all the pieces attached to our chandiler. Lucky for us, we still had the box. Unlucky for us, we've been using it as a trash can this week.

Back to Tara, she was selling her various cozys, and I ended up with this one that's for your ice cream. It's one of those great ideas that you hate yourself a little bit for for not coming up with up yourself. I always have a kitchen towel wrapped up around mine. I'm not sharing mine, but you can get your own from her Etsy store.



So who wants to come over and help me stencil this weekend? Have you ever used a stencil for an entire room? What sweet scores have you picked up lately? Did you love Lost so much that you still try to work it in to conversations or perhaps sing a little made up song (Lost, lost. Losty, lost lost!) in your head? Leave me a link in the comments and I'll be sure to go admire your handywork!

I was not compensated by any of the companies mentioned above and the opinions are all mine. Especially the decision to call the pig speaker little, it's so cute and tiny!