How to Stencil a Wall! {staircase}

Smiles peeps,

A few days ago I promised I would do a post on how we stenciled our hallway..

Well I'm a person of my word!

Before I show you how, check our completed hallway here.

Obviously chose your stencil and paint color.  Our stencil is Hobby Lobby's - Vintage Flower, and I'm using the same color paint that is in on our surrounding walls.

The first thing we did, using a level, was to draw (pencil) a level vertical line down the wall.  We started approximately at the center of the stairway wall.

Each stencil has "pattern guides" (tiny on this stencil) on them (arrows).  We started at the highest point on the wall (just below angled ceiling) and lined up the stencil guides.  Our stencil had 4 guides, 1 at each corner.  We lined up the guides on the right side even with our level line.

When we first started out we "taped" our stencil in place...

but quickly learned that this didn't work.  Our stencil had a very "dense" pattern to it, and the tape just didn't hold the stencil to the wall well enough.

See by the arrow, the stencil shifted and the paint would smear.  We quickly learned that using a re-positioning spray was the ONLY way to go.  It held the stencil against the wall without slippage.

Also we tried out several rollers, our walls are plaster and have a texture to them, a sponge roller work best.

Did you notice a little bit of stencil pattern to the right of the center line? I used this as a testing spot to practiced on how much pressure and paint to use. After practicing we re-painted over this section.

We kept moving the stencil down the wall, next we moved the stencil to the left until the entire left side of the wall was done (sorry about picture quality, sometimes  my camera had a hard time "focusing".

Then we aligned our stencil guides to the right of our center (starting) point,  and stenciled a horizontal row all the way across the wall to the right.  We kept stenciling this area until the whole areas was stenciled.

As we were stenciling, and again because the stencil was dense, we couldn't see our marking guides anymore, and it was really becoming difficult to line the stencil up and very time consuming. So we started lining up our stencil by using a level guide.  We lined it up vertically and..

and horizontally.  Once we started aligning our stencil this way it became so much easier than looking for "TINY" guides.

Now we needed to start filling in areas like this, and  at the ceiling and floor wall angles.

So I cut up my stencil, in to 3 pieces, 1 - a whole flower, 2 flowers and 4 flower stencil.

Here I lined up stencil to the flower on the left and filled in the stencil on the right.

I did this until the entire wall was filled in, this took a very long time since we were dealing with two angled walls (see first picture).

In areas where the flower was smudged because the stencil moved, I used a small paint brush to fix.

This is the same area and you can't tell!  "Repairing" areas like this took me over a day to do.  Also I learned for this stencil NOT to use a lot of pressure on the roller either.  More pressure caused smudging.  I found less pressure combined with less paint worked the best.

Filling in areas by the ceiling/floor angles with the flower pattern was messy and a very time consuming job.

It took a week to complete this wall!

I really love how the stencil looks and the character it brings.

I am very please with it, but it will be a while before I stencil an angled wall again!

Savvy Southern Style