Seeing Chevron

Way back in April, when I first posted about our dining room, I had mentioned wanting to add a touch of chevron in the form of either curtain panels or a large dining room suitable rug.  For now, I decided to go the chevron curtain route since we already owned a set of plain white Ritva panels from IKEA that would make the perfect blank canvas for a little chevron painting fun.

Here are our supplies:

I color matched a beautiful rich, deep chocolate brown paint color (I have since misplaced the paint chip so I'm not sure of the exact color...sorry!) to a flat 'One by Olympic' gallon of paint that we picked up on sale at Lowe's.  We also used textile medium in our paint (1:2 ratio of medium to paint) to make the paint more flexible when dry.  The curtain would be washable if I heat set the paint/textile medium combo with an iron, although I'm not sure I'd trust it in my washing machine:).  

In the future, I'd love to do a mini test to see how much impact the textile medium has on fabric flexibility and prevention of cracking, although the medium was not that expensive.  I used about 1 1/2 bottles of textile medium, and I stuck closely to the 1:2 ratio (medium to paint) recommended by the manufacturer.  Full price the bottles are $7.99 each at Joann's (located by the acrylic paints), but I used coupons on both bottles making the total for 2 bottles around $9.

When I first added the textile medium to the paint, I was worried that it would affect the color of my paint because the medium is a thick, white product, but my dark, brown paint color was not changed with the addition of textile medium.  I mixed the paint and medium together in a blue plastic cup:

We save our Red Solo cups for other things:).

And then I poured the paint into a paint tray within a cardboard box (to be safe since I was painting on the floor in our great room):

As for decisions on the size of the chevron stripes we wanted to make, I looked to this tutorial from the blog A Drop in the Bucket:

via

Shalynn used this spacing to create her bold chevron stripes (painted on a huge $20 drop cloth...brilliant!)

For our purposes, I decided that the 6 inch stripes would be a bit too thick for our space, so we decided on 4 inch stripes but kept the 12 inch spacing between peaks in place.  (In retrospect, I wish I would have drawn out our proposed spacing on a big piece of poster board so I could get the feeling of the stripe size.  I think I would have landed on an even smaller stripe size...like 3 inches or maybe even 2 inches.  Next time:).)

My amazing husband marked and taped out the curtain panels for me:

We just used the tape we had on hand, although it was much easier to paint when 2 pieces of 2" tape were placed side by side to create the four inch 'white' sections of the chevron pattern because there were no gaps, thus no opportunites for a roller to sneak over a tape line into the wrong section.

After taping, Bill needed a break so he laid down for a minute in Charm's room.  The kids created a colorful Daddy mountain while he rested his back and knees:

That's Bill under the pile of rugs, blankets, pillows and stuffed animals.

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His left hand is under this carefully placed pile of feathers.

The Daddy emerges...and a 30 minute feather pickup ensues.

And now back to the curtains.  Here is the second panel that was taped using 2 inch painter's tape:  

Painting it was super easy, since I didn't have to think about what parts needed to stay white versus being painted.  Any exposed part of the curtain got painted.

Here is the same curtain panel after I applied a second coat of paint:

I painted 3 or 4 stripes at a time and then removed the tape around those stripes to give me the best chance of having clean lines.  It worked well!!  Here are some more pictures:

And for a little fun, here's our dining room last year:

Add a basket wall, a chalkboard menu, wall art, a homemade curtain rod, a new dining bench (and table), new to us dining room chairs, a settee and now chevron curtains.  Then takeaway 2 booster seats, and here is our dining room now:

It's amazing what a difference a year makes!  Is anyone else chevron happy?  

Don't forget to enter my Christmas Starbucks Giftcard Giveaway if you haven't done so already...your odds are really good for this one:)!

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