Oh, My

Son # 2 has long out-grown the decorative scheme in his bedroom, not to mention the bed itself.  I used to do stenciling, hand-painted backgrounds, murals, and faux-finished walls all over the house.  When Son #1 used to have this same bedroom, he was utterly fascinated by cars, trucks, motorcycles - anything with wheels.  When we moved him up to a toddler bed, I completely re-did his room in the aforementioned vehicular fashion.  With a twist.

The cars were stenciled (obviously) using acrylic paints, by my son's request (very, very specific request).  Little details like the steering wheels & highlights were added freehand.  The background, however, was done completely freehand, using the children's classic, The Little Engine That Could, as inspiration.  What you can't see is the meadow, complete with flower covered hillsides.  If you look very carefully, you can see the soft, textured clouds in the "sky" above the town that I slaved over for about three days.  Promptly after I finished the entire room, the husband decided it would be a good idea to repaint the ceiling as well.  And then wiped the extra paint off of the brush, onto both the hillside and the sky areas.  With a different color of white.

Gee, thanks.

Just to give you a rough idea of how far behind on projects I am - this room was originally painted when Son #1 was moving up from the crib to his toddler bed.

He is now 19.

Son #2 inherited this room when he was born and we moved Son #1 across the hall into the recently vacated roommate's old room.  Since Son #2 is now nearly 16, it is high time for a makeover.  We've been discussing colors and arguing about his choice of deep purple (love the color but I'm shuddering over the possibility of having to paint over that again at some point).  We settled on green as the wall color with the dark purple as a trim color (like maybe a stripe toward the ceiling).  I happened to stumble on a fabulous site today and it totally got the creative juices flowing - Cutting Edge Stencils -and I'm trying to talk him into letting me do this on his walls:


In colors to match his scheme, anyway.  The jury is still out on that one.  I really like it.

I'm still drooling over this site, though.  And trying to figure out how I can duplicate this on my vaulted family room ceiling:



The birds are the only thing in the stencil.  The sky would have to be done by hand.  Part of my ceiling is 8ft high, but the opposite wall vaults to over 14ft with two skylights.

But I Just.  Have.  To.  Do this.

This was the Sewing Assistant's reaction when I showed him what would be going into that room:

WHAT?  BIRDS?  WHERE?