Pottery Barn Kids Nursery Knock-off Part 1: Stenciling the Walls

ETA: The nursery is done!  Check out the finished room HERE.  You can also find details on my DIY crib bedding HERE and my DIY wall art HERE.

Thought I'd pop in to show you what my husband's been working on lately.  We're expecting a baby girl in May.  Hooray!  So my husband's been busy painting Baby Girl's nursery. 

We're doing a knock-off of this Scallop Pique Nursery from Pottery Barn Kids.

Look at what a great job Ben's doing with those walls!

The first order of business was painting the base color.  Pottery Barn Kids teamed up with Benjamin Moore to pick their paint colors, meaning that every paint color you see in PBK stores or catalogs is a Benjamin Moore paint color and can be purchased from a Benjamin Moore retailer.  Our local PBK store gave us a free pack of paint swatches.  We picked the swatch that matched the photo in the catalog (Iced Lavender), then took it to be color matched for a less expensive brand of paint at our local hardware store.

The next order of business was creating a stencil.  I bought a 10" x 18" stencil blank, a.k.a. stencil film, at JoAnn.  (Click here to purchase one from Amazon.com.)  Then Ben worked his magic to design this file on the computer.  You can click on the file, print, and enlarge it until it measures 10" x 18".  Note: You only need one dot between each of the parenthesis-looking things (that's an official term, right?).  Ben originally printed his design with two dots to help him align the images correctly, then changed his mind once he realized he'd need to use a level anyway.

Ben designed the stencil, then printed the design on computer paper.  It printed onto two pages, which Ben taped together.  Sorry that I don't have a picture of this, but Ben placed the stencil blank on top of the printed design, then used an X-acto knife to cut through the stencil film, creating his stencil.  If these instructions are as clear as mud, click HERE to see a video from PBK about making your own stencil, paying special attention around the 1:00 mark.

Now our walls look like this.  Okay, really they look much more lavender than in this photo.  (See the photo of Ben near the top of the post.)  And this was as much of the wall as I could squish into the photo.  One day I'll figure out the whole lighting/wide-angle lens thing.  Still, you can see that my husband did a stinkin' awesome job on the stenciling.

Stay tuned for my DIY crib bedding.