Who let Shel Silverstein into my room?

I know it looks like I skipped a day of blogging, but my rationale has always been "it's still today until I go to bed," so in fact I'm just late!   This is really just a better time for me to sit down and chart my progress (or distract from the lack thereof) than in the middle of the day.  I'm finding it hard to get my aging buns back in gear if I sit down for an hour or more to write in the middle of the day,  so I'm grounding myself from the computer until after ten p.m.  Well, except for gmail/chat (gotta have my Evin fix).  And FB (only so I can keep up with my kids ;).  And my three games of Wheel of Fortune every morning.  Of course.

There I go digressing again.  I hinted that I wasn't happy with the tree in a reply to a comment yesterday.  Sigh.  I really, really blew it picturing this one in my head.  I was hoping for dramatic and instead I got what might be a great cover for "The Giving Tree" but is so not right in this room...

I'm going to leave it for now, but I expect that I will probably be going back in and painting all of the leaves silver.  As it is, it's just too cutesy.  The trees on the other side of the room, I think I may just leave white, but I'm going to hold off on any firm decisions about the trees until I get all of the soft furnishings in the room.  There's going to be so much added color with the curtains and headboard and whatnot that I may not need the extra color on the walls at all.  (This is one of those many instances where Having A Firm Plan would have saved me time and money.)

You might have noticed that I did some exploring as I sat in that chair (blame the early lunches - I end up sitting in that chair a LOT after an early lunch), pulling a bit more of the fabric and stuffing away from that right arm so I could see what I have to work with.  Lawdy, this is going to be a job.

In other news, I got a good start on the rest of the walls...

The colors aren't true and I'm a PhotoShop idjit, but hopefully you can see what I've done here.  Which is to use the leaf stencil semi-randomly within each of the metallic gray stripes using a clear, low-luster (satin) waterborne polyurethane.   (Benjamin Moore's "Stays Clear" in this instance, but any brand will do.)   Since the base coat is flat, the stenciled leaves give just a glimmer of a pattern to the walls.  For the stripes,  I used the same blended colors I used on the bit of trim I painted.  (Ralph Lauren Regent Metallics "Silver Bell," with Valspar's "Black Suede")

A little bit closer.  By the way, my lines really aren't bowed like that.  My camera seems to be distorting things.  Or is that a normal thing due to perspective?  Anyway, I can assure you I would not paint bowed lines, but every photo I took shows bowed lines.  I plan to go down the center of each of the gray stripes with a thin stripe of the darkest green I picked up and then the walls will be finito, baby.  Well, except for The Giving Tree.  

Another, super simple way to get the same sort of damask effect on walls is to simply rag the polyurethane on like I did here...

I lied.  In this case I actually used a semi-gloss paint in an ever-so-slightly darker shade than the flat walls, but the general idea is the same.  You can also paint the walls with a satin or semi-gloss and rag a flat paint on top, of course.  Notice what a great (scan of a) photo this is in comparison to the ones I took of my own room?  That's because I didn't take this photo; a professional photographer did.  What a luxury that was, to have good photos of something I'd done.  I can't for the life of me remember the photographer's name now.  (If you happen to see this, Jan, maybe you can help me out so I can give him due credit. :)

I'll leave you with another Random Photo of the Week.  I don't remember what I was looking for when I stumbled on this one, but the hanging lamps made me go "Wow!"  Until I looked at it for another second or two and wondered how much maneuvering you'd have to do to get into bed without knocking your head into them.  I love the way they look though...

From Interiors And Decorations (basically an ad-spam site with pretty pictures).

See you manana!