For quite a while I have been trying to decide what to do with the area above the picture rail in the back room. It is possible that, as in the front room, a shelf may have been there but that did not seem like a good idea. Pictures could go up there but would be difficult to put up and to see. It would be best if something was done to compliment the frieze after all the work that was put into restoring it. After restoring the original stencilling in the front room and the hallway I have become interested in the possibility of using stencils elsewhere in the house and have been looking at various web sites.
A web site was found with interesting large stencils and it was decided that one of these would be used above the picture rail and just below the frieze. What was thought a suitable one was ordered but before it could be used the walls needed to be painted and a decision made about the colour of the picture rail. The colour of the rail could be decided on as a working matter but the wall painting and the stencilling needed to be tried out first.
The first trial did not work out too well as the middle colour from the frieze was used, it looked very different when put on a different background colour and a lot more of it. So a decision was made to paint it out and redo in a different colour. The next colour was similar to the lower part of the frieze and worked much better so it was decided to continue around the room.
An interesting thing about stencils is that not all of the pattern needs to be used. So over the fireplace only a portion of the stencil was used, as an experiment.
It looked good… so the whole room is to be done. This also meant fixing the bay corners which still had a lot of old water damage from years ago. This would include some plastering and the possible use of lining paper.
Seven stencils have now been done and ¾ of the walls painted but the rest of the skirting board and picture rail still need to be stripped and painted the same colour as the door.
It is difficult to show the proper colours but the two below are the most realistic (no flash).
Looking REALLY nice! Is another floral pattern going in the middle? What does the stencil look flipped over--does it connect up and look good?
ReplyDeleteThanks... more of the same would be too much. Perhaps in the middle could be a thin wall hanging! After choosing the stencil, on the website, it was copied into memory using 'print scr'then pasted into 'paint, where it could be flipped around. The saved images were then pasted into a CAD package that had 3d views of the room. Sounds complicated but it did not take long to see the different layouts
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I cannot comment as trafrd.
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