Apparently I don't have a good eye for "straightness", so the first time around my pencil tracings of the stencil pattern was off. Which resulted in my frantically erasing the pattern off the wall. Which resulted in gray smudge marks all over the wall. Which resulted in the use of the magic eraser to rid the smudge marks. Which resulted in the disappearance of the sheen in the paint (yes, magic erasers can remove the sheen from your wall!). Long story long, this resulted in our repainting the wall. Not good.
After I finally was successful in tracing out the pattern in relatively straight lines, I found out that the Folk Art paint I bought was no good for such a project. The paint is water-based and when we tried to apply it to the wall it would just spread and basically sort of not stay in place. Which is not good when you are stenciling. You really want to have thick, pigmented paint that stays in place.
So when we went to Home Depot the other day to pick up things for the chandelier, we also wanted to pick up a small bottle of white paint. We were paralyzed by all the white paints available. There are so many choices and each "white" was slightly different. Some were sort of grayish, some yellowish. There was a whole range from "Cotton Fluff" to "Snow" to "Almond Latte".
After comparing 10 different white colors, we ultimately went with Glidden's "White on White" since it looked the truest to white. When we asked the Home Depot paint guy for a sample, he basically just handed us the tintable tester straight up. Haha. We felt silly. Should've thought of that, huh?
I requested for some motivational music to get us going. I specifically requested not to hear any military marches (David's idea of motivational). But lo and behold, what did he already have pulled up on Youtube? Star Wars "Imperial March". With a big grin, I might add. I know my husband way too well. I amaze myself sometimes.
And we played some really random songs. Like Wakko's "50 State Capitols" (I was a die-hard Animaniacs fan). Like the theme from "Up" (which we watched on David's birthday last year. Makes me cry every time). Like Taiwan's "Tomorrow Will be Better" (oh such good memories of Dad singing that in the mornings). Anyway, we played anything and everything we could think of.