{DIY} Stencilled Roller Blind

Due date has come and gone with no sign of Baby MiH. It left us time to make a few more additions to the room, and hang some pictures here and there. It also gave me the opportunity to work on my next GIVEAWAY - so check out this space on Thursday for a Christmas themed giveaway!

In my last bits + pieces I mentioned the DIY stencilled roller blind we spent one Saturday evening making. Here is how we did it - and if we can do it, so can you. It is a great way to update a room without spending a lot of money. 

So you need:

- A blackout roller blind (we bought a standard one at a DIY store)
- A gentle cleaning product (to clean the blind)
- A stencil (we bought ours to save time, similar here, but you could make yours)
- Acrylic paint (we used Liquitex -Unbleached Titanium- and Galeria -Cerulean Blue Hue)
- Natural sponge (similar here)
- Masking tape 

1. Take the blind off and roll it out. Protect your flooring with newspapers, just in case . Clean the blind with your gentle cleaning product so there is no dust left. 

2. Mark up with the masking tape where you want to stencil. It provides a guideline of where to position the stencil as well - and does leave any mark on the blind. 

Mr MiH decided to note where the rabbits should be stencilled, needless to say I still got it wrong. 

3. Place your stencil and dab paint with the sponge. No painting, just gently dabbing the paint. You should not put too much paint on the sponge, if you feel the colour is not strong enough, dab more paint. 

4. Arrange your colours as you wish. As we did it during the same evening, it was a bit hard to reach the rabbits in the middle - although the acrylic paint actually dried quite quickly. All I can say is that it is a good job Mr MiH is quite tall and can reach further than I cannot. 

5. Here we are, lovely stencilled rabbits adorning our bland grey blind - didn't I say it was easy! 

A few words of warning, this method does not leave much room for error, we first tried stencilling one rabbit at the very top of the blind to assess how much paint we should have on our sponge and the dabbing process. Also the paint does dry quickly, which is good to re-use the same stencil, but a bit of nightmare if you have dabbed outside the stencil (we had some wipes handy for the few issues we had). Finally (or maybe firstly) think of how you are going to arrange the different stencils and spend some time marking them - unless you are one for random stencilling, it does pay off in the end. 

Et voila! Hope you are inspired enough to try it out on your own roller blind!