Stenciling 101

Lesson 4: Stenciling Situations

Walls III - Borders and Friezes

These work much like framing a door or window. You must first draw a guideline that will guide your stenciling so that it doesn't run up or downhill. Use your carpenter's level to draw this out. Eyeballing it seldom works. Once again, however, if when you place the stencil against the ceiling you are satisfied with the space left between the stenciling area and the top of the stencil you can eliminate this step. If you live in an old house where nothing is level to start with, this is often the wisest choice.

Next, you must measure your stencil and the length of each wall to see whether you will run into any problems with spacing. Adjust your repeats accordingly. You may need to leave some space between each repeat. You can also choose to stop just short of each corner (measuring will tell you exactly how short a space you need to leave on each end) and simply leave it blank, or select a corner element that will fill in the empty space. In this border I ran into what might have been a spacing problem, except that I chose to stencil only half of the border element when I ran into the white column, making it appear as though the stencil goes behind the column.

If you'd rather avoid corner stenciling, let the gap come dead center on each wall and select a compatible design to mark the center point. However, many stencils are light and pliable enough that they will easily bend right around the corner so that you can repeat without leaving those corners open, or stencil only half the motif - whatever works with your room layout and stencil. The palm border stencil above was pliable enough to allow me to stencil only half the motif.

If your stencil is fairly light and pliable you can also easily bend it to go around corners. Aim to do your shortest and least obvious last wall last – especially if it is broken up by doors and windows you may easily be able to compensate for a design that doesn't quite fit the dimensions.

Don't assume that you need to have a so-called border stencil to create a pleasing border. Any design can be repeated to create a border effect. A row of 25 repeating daisies is as much a border as a repeating Greek key motif, and is probably more forgiving when it comes to spacing. Or mix elements, like the sun, moon and stars in the border at the right. And yes - you can run a border vertically as well as horizontally.

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8