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