Master Bedroom Update, Part 3

Do you get inspired by nature like I do?  More times then not, I want to be enjoying the outdoors: frolicking in the trees, laying out in the sunshine at the beach, or even working on a sweat in the garden.

But I can't be outside all the time.  It would be awfully cold to be sleeping out in my backyard in the damp coastal weather.  But maybe I can bring that feeling of being surrounded by nature inside?  Like on all four walls of my bedroom!

Homemade Stencil

I found section of a fern and had it blown up to fit on a 11x17 size of paper.  Then I cut out the shape, traced the shape on a flattened cereal box, and WAH-LA!  I had my own homemade stencil that didn't cost me a cent.  (Also what didn't cost me a cent was an old bath sponge that I was going to throw out anyway. :-)

I could vary the height of the stencil, depending on where I placed it on the wall and how far down I painted, and could also (after the paint had dried on the cardboard) flip the stencil over and work with the mirror image or rotate the stencil to make the print look different everytime.  Can you guess, by the picture above, that each fern print came from the same stencil?

I loved playing around with the shape and coming up with new configurations that would add to the "organic" look I was going for.  This layout was definetly not planned out, but thats exactly why I love this type of stencil to work with.  Not like the geometric pattern stenciling projects I've seen that look great, but so much repeated steps-that can get boring to do quite quickly.  This project took me three 2 hour-nights to do, but could have easily been done in one day (if I ever had an entire day to myself ;-).

Have you ever done any stenciling?  What did you most enjoy about it?