A Big Giant Sweater

My sister asked me to come down to her house to do a little something to her son Paulie's bedroom wall. She didn't want anything that her 3 1/2 year old would outgrow in a year or two, so no characters or toys. I was asking myself...what's left...some sort of pattern? Her boys are always impeccably dressed with cute polo shirts and sweater vests....mmmm argyle? She loved the idea! I did some research and found a great tutorial on the blog Design Dazzle.

Here's a before picture of the wall in his room...pretty plain.

Let me say at the beginning this project takes a lot of patience. I measured once, twice and even a third time. I didn't want to get half-way through and realize I made a mistake somewhere in the beginning. I'm talking from experience :-)

You can read a precise step-by-step tutorial on the Design Dazzle blog. Why reinvent the wheel right? But I will give you the cliff notes and show you my photographic step-by-step. To get started make sure you have a lot of green frog tape. This has become my "go to" whenever I need to tape something off for painting. I have found that blue painters tape just bleeds too much for me.

To figure out the diamonds I first needed to determine how many rows and columns we wanted on the wall. There is even an online calculator at Silver Spoon Murals to figure this out. I love the internet!!! At first we couldn't decide on three or four rows so I cut out diamonds in each size and decided on 3. Sometimes once you "see" it, you just know.

Once that decision was made the measuring began. Basically, I drew a bunch of rectangles on the wall. Then found the middle of each rectangle and marked the top, bottom, right and left side. I connected the dots by taping to form the diamond pattern.

I taped off all the blue diamonds first (every other row) and painted those. Once the paint dried I did the same thing for the light tan diamonds. I think it was about at this point my nephew Liam walked into the room and said "It looks like a big giant sweater."

Just an FYI: I went through two rolls of the green frog tape. And that was with reusing many of the pieces. If you don't want to reuse any I would say you'd need at least three rolls and perhaps four.

I have to admit I REALLY didn't want to do this next step. On the tutorial I read they used a stencil to make the fine dashed lines. I was concerned it was a bit too busy. I needed to figure out how to make a solid thin line. Back to the green frog tape.

First my brother-in-law and I placed chalk lines where the fine lines would be. Then I began taping...again :-)

I taped in one direction first. Painted those lines black, removed the tape then repeated this step in the other direction.

Here's a close-up view.

And here's the finale. My sister really liked it and I hope her son will too. He will be home from grandma and grandpa's tomorrow. I can't wait to hear what he has to say! I'm also painting a nightstand for his room but didn't get the time to finish it before we had to head home.

The kids had a great time playing with their cousins. And I can check a project off my list...a pretty good week!

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Check out what others have done this week! It's always inspiring.