tuscan wallpaper border

Decorating Your Home With Stencils

When most people think of stencils they think of very simple, one-or-two color borders running around the walls, but these days stencils have been designed in multiple layers so you can create real works of art.

I've moved from home to home - first a couple of apartments and then houses - and I know how fun it is to decorate... after the hard work of painting or wallpapering the walls has been done. Wallpapering was the worst - what a lot of work that entails! I made a vow after the first - and only - time I did wallpapering that I'd never do it again.

So when I feel in the mood for a different look in a particular room, I simply repaint the walls, and then add whatever decorations suit me. I've recently started experimenting with stencils.

Applying stencils to a wall is easy - a fact I appreciate greatly - but there is such a wide variety of patterns on the market - either online or from your local home improvement store - that I can make quite sophisticated designs, and all in just minutes.

Most people use stencils just to make wall borders, but there's no reason to confine yourself to just that, considering all the designs available these days. You can stencil an entire wall from floor to ceiling and make it look like a piece of art.

There are many places on the web that offer stencils...and ideas on how to apply those stencils to your walls in order to create works of art that will be a pleasure to view for a long time.

You might think that stencils can't produce works of art, but you'd be wrong. Stencils these days are actually quite complex, with designs coming with several "overlays" so that you apply one coat of paint with one overlay, wait for that to dry and apply another, and thus you can do really complex full-color designs such as fully-realized animals, fruit and vegetables, or even "trompe l'oil" (fool the eye) designs such as a Tuscan wine cellar!