How-to: Clean-edged stripes

Once again, I accomplished diddly-squat in The Room.  I spent the bulk of the afternoon driving from one Hobby Lobby to another, amassing the yardage I'm going to need for all of these floor-to-ceiling curtains I have planned.  By the time I got home and had dinner it was after 8:00 p.m. and there's just no way I feel like starting on anything after 8:00 p.m. - not when there's an episode of Medium that needs watching (which, today's paper tells me, has been cancelled again).

I forgot when I was typing up last night's blog entry that I had snapped pics of the striping process, with plans to show how to get (almost) perfectly clean edges.  I'm so glad I forgot now, as it gives me something simple to blog about today!

As I've mentioned before, in Colorado you can't find a smooth wall to save your life.  Most drywall is finished with either "orange peel" texture which looks like this...

Or with "knock-down" texture which looks like this...

Both textures can be a nightmare for faux finishers and decorative painters, but the orange peel in particular... Well, let's just say there's a special place in hell reserved for the joker who came up with that one.  You only have to take one look at it to understand why you're not going to get nice, clean lines by simply taping over it.  I obliterated the dreaded orange peel from my home in all but one bathroom and the ceiling of The Room, so I don't have a handy spot to show you here, but you can see just from this photo what happens when you tape over texture of any sort...

No matter how securely you think you've pressed down your tape, there will be gaps for paint to sneak under and you're going to end up with a messy line.  There's a super easy fix though...

Before you go in with your stripe color, paint over the tape with your wall color first.  That way, the paint that sneaks under the gaps will match the walls and disappear!  If you for some reason don't have any of the wall color, you can also use a clear medium, such as the waterborne polyurethane I used for my tone-on-tone stenciling, but you'll need to be sure it matches the sheen of your current wall color.  If you need matte, the only product I know of that will work is Modern Masters Dead Flat Varnish.  It's pricey, but you won't need much.  

By the way, the temperatures here came no where close to the high of 60 that was forecast for yesterday and today, so you can blame the weatherman for there being no progress on the drum table.  I was hoping to do that one in the my main level studio (otherwise known as "the garage"), because toxic fumes will be involved, but it looks like I'm just going to have to hold my breath and do it in my lower-level studio (also known as "the basement").   

That's it for today, and I'm definitely taking the weekend off from blogging in the hopes of having something more exciting to share on Monday.  Thanks for stopping by!