Toddler Room!

I have finally painted Gabi's toddler room! Awhile ago, I decided to decorate Gabi's room with butterflies, so I started sketching butterfly shapes and selected a color palette. Here are the finalists:



After Gabi's birthday celebration, we left her in Texas with Gramma Jane and Grampa (and her college-aged uncles on Spring Break) so that I could have the time and free hands to actually paint. First, Michael helped prep the room -- clear out furniture, remove doors, take off outlet covers, tape around the trim, lay down a drop cloth, and wipe off the walls. I even primed, so we started with a nice white. Next, I cut in around the edges with our base color, lavender.





Now the walls are a beautiful lavender! Actually, it is Glidden's "Lilac Bouquet," in case you were wondering. The first coat wasn't quite even enough, but I was very pleased with how the walls turned out after a second coat. I ran the paint bucket completely dry going back over any cut-in brush strokes around the edges.




(It really is all the same color, even though the natural window lighting looks darker than the room lighting with flash. I do love the natural light, though the other ones reflect the true color a bit better.)

I wanted to design and create my own stencils for the chair-rail height border of butterflies. I enlarged my butterfly drawings so that they were all between 6 and 8 inches tall, with two shapes being 9" wide and two being 7.5" wide. I bought some blank stencil sheets and traced the shapes onto the sheets -- with one sheet for the body (A), one sheet for the wing's main color (B), and one sheet for the wing's design color (C), thus using three stencils per butterfly (also drawing reticulation lines on the stencil sheets as guides to line up the second and third stencils over the paint on the wall from previous stencils). Then came the tedious job of cutting out the stencils, which took much longer than I expected.

I transfered the 4 butterfly shapes onto the computer for color testing with our four accent colors (purple, blue, pink, and yellow). Each butterly is to have three colors: one color for the center body, and two colors for the wings. We determined that the butterfly bodies should not be purple, and we preferred the wings not be both pink and yellow. That gave us 16 color permutations (with wing base color distinct from wing design color), and I printed up some "color guide" butterflies to place around the room after arranging them so as to generally spread out colors. 16 butterflies ended up repeating 2.5 times around the room, and since my 16 color options are a multiple of my 4 shapes, I reshuffled the deck of color guides each time it repeated so that the different color arrangements would appear on different shapes and give me unique butterflies all around the room (or at least be more likely to, as I didn't calculate exactly). Yay! One of the benefits of painting a border instead of using a wallpaper border.

Before I could begin painting butterflies, I measured how high I wanted the border and, using a level, marked a horizontal chalk line through the center of the border area. The stencils came with a center line guide, which I used to keep my butterflies level and at the correct height. At last, I started painting butterfly bodies all around the room.



And then I added the first wing color for every butterfly...

Finally I completed the third color for each butterfly. The stenciling also took longer than anticipated because I had to clean paint off the stencils every time I moved it to the next position, and do so carefully so as not to tear my meticulously-created stencils! If I ever do this again, I might paint all of one color the first time around the room and then move on to the next color, rather than painting all of one butterfly part first... I'll have to think about that.



I also used our four accent colors to paint wooden letters to spell Gabi's name. Maybe this weekend I will hang them on the wall. :) For those who are curious, the blue is "Sailing Sky," the pink is "Valentine Pink," the purple is "Veronica's Sash," and the yellow is "Cheers."

I did not get all the butterflies complete before Gabi returned from her visit with grandparents. When she came home and saw her room covered in painting supplies instead of furniture, she asked, "What happened to room?" That became a favorite phrase until the project was completed. With no door on the frame to block Gabi's entrance, we generally played downstairs with a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs. Sometimes, however, Gabi could go upstairs. One time after a bathroom break, I came into the room to discover that I had an eager helper working with my paint stirers.

Once I completed all the painting, I wiped off the chalk guide line, cleaned up everything, and showed the room to Gabi. She was thrilled!

And the room looks even more like home with doors hung, furniture in place, and the blinds and valence on the window. (I guess I don't have a picture of the valence here, but it matches the caddies on the changing table.)





Here is what the paint job looks like next to Gabi's bedspread and sheets.

So that's one of the many projects I've been busy doing recently. I hope to post pictures from the past two months soon!