Stencil Wall

Since we got home from our trip to UT, I have been wanting to finish (or start) some home projects. I have discovered that I have serious commitment issues when it comes to home decor. I can't decide what I want or commit to anything so I just don't do anything. We have lived in this house for almost a year and a half and I still have pictures that could be hung, rooms to paint and endless projects. So, I am working on figuring it out.

First, I had to add some color to our family room. It is like various shades of beige threw up in my family room and I hate it. So, I saw this post on All Things Thrifty and decided I wanted to try it. Someone else linked by ATT blog gave me the idea to use Picnik to figure out my stencil.
So, I uploaded a picture of the wall I wanted to do to PicnikThen went to create, stickers, Floralia, and found this image that I liked.
And I played around with it and came up with this.

So, I made the stencil according to the instructions on ATT. And taking some advice that I read on there I bought the Golden heavy duty acrylic paint and stencil brush and started stenciling away.
Unfortunately, the one row that took my all day to stencil ended up being off center. I guess I didn't account for overlap in my measurements. I was very sad, but knew I had to start over. Also, I found that this one row took almost the entire tube of acrylic paint that I bought (which cost $9 at 40% off), hours to do, and wore my arm right out. I knew I had to figure a better way to do this.

So, I found some more advice. I bought a quart of regular wall paint at home depo and a small sponge roller. It bled a little bit more (you had to be careful to have the roller pretty dry) and used the stencil brush to get the edges a bit better, but it ended up working way better. I was even able to recruit my friend Emily to help a couple of the days.
I am not going to lie, it took like a week to finish because I tried to do most of it during naptimes. It was just really tedious and each stencil took like 20 min (and I had to do 70 stencils). The girls did a lot of entertaining themselves. Good thing we have a lot of dress ups.
But finally, I finished (well, mostly finished, I am still debating what to do about the bottom - not enough room for another full stencil, do I cut it in half or leave it alone?) I love the way it turned out and I can't wait to start adding more orange and other colors with pillows and more.