restylin: Stair-Wall Project

Hello Readers!

I have an exciting project to share with you today! Not only is it exciting, but did I mention it was...FREE??! Yep, didn't cost me one penny. However, it did take a little time and my little hand does kinda hurt. More on that in a second. I needed to fill a space in our foyer that I have been wanting to fill for awhile. When I redid our foyer a few months ago (you can see that here) I knew I needed to do something on our HUGE, TALL wall that leads up the stairs. Here it is here:

Blah. I had two sconce thingy's there, but they need to find a new home. So what I decided to do was stencil "The Graham's" and then place pictures around it of our family.

Here is what you need to do this stencil project:

Card stock
Exact o-Knife
Printer & Computer :)
Tape
Paint & foam brush

Just a few steps. I opened a word document and typed what I wanted which was "The Graham's". I put it into the font I wanted and made it a 300 pt. font. Then print out on the card stock. You want to use card stock because its thicker then paper which will hold up better when you start cutting it out. Here is what I got:

Now you need to get to cutting! This is where my hand hurt...After trying to be so precise, it hurts.

After you finish cutting, I went and hung it on the wall where I wanted with some tape and left it there for a day to make sure that's where I wanted it.

Then came the "fun" part. Painting the stencil. I used a brown sample paint that I already had (free!) and grabbed my little foam brush from Michael's that I also already had (but if you needed one, they are only .73). Here is what it looked like after one coat. I did two, just to make sure!

So the next step was to break out the old Ikea frames (6 of them) and they were also free since I already them. I decided to paint them a pretty light blue color so the whole thing would blend in with the foyer. The paint was a sample paint I already had. I sanded down the frames and got to painting and they turned out so pretty!! Here is the final product up on the wall. Pardon the quality, I took them at night so I'm not sure they turned out too great.