This, my dears, is a pathetic tutorial but a tutorial nonetheless, of something that I wished I would have known a long time ago. When I was in my late teens, I was sick of the white bedroom walls at my parents house and was ready to fingerpaint them just to give them some color. One day, I got the bright idea to paint one wall with stripes, and the other three with bright green! Baaaad idea. The bright green came out to be neon, blinding, highlighter green, and the stripes...well...they were more lines squiggly lines from carpet to ceiling. At the time, I was fairly impressed with my skills, but now that I know better, I wish I could have a re-do.
My problem was that I painted the lines directly on my Scotch paint tape. I attempted making 1 1/2" stripes, with 1" bright green and the 1/2" turquoise blue (don't judge me, I was a teenager). When I painted the stripes directly, the paint seeped underneath the tape, creating the squiggly lines and therefore destroying my vision of a clean, straight stripe.
At 21, I wisened up and when I moved into my Salt Lake City apartment, I knew just what I wanted to do.
Stripes.
That I did. But this time, it was a little different. Using the same Scotch painting tape I had used in the past, I measured my stripes and taped off what I needed. My stripes were around 19" to fit evenly across the wall. To assure that the lines were as straight as possible, I first painted each gray stripe with a thin border of white, so that it would fill in the cracks and spaces left in the bubble of the tape. Therefore, when I removed the tape after filling in each gray stripe, there was not a line out of place! Ahhh...the joys of doing it right the second time.
Craft on, little birdies
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