How to Paint a Plaid Wall

      Well, this little project took me about two months.  Not because it should take that long, but because I really was gone that much.  I think in a normal time frame, it would have taken me about 1 week working on it in between normal stuff.  That said, this project was a little time-consuming.  But I like the way it turned out, and I am excited to finish up the rest of the room.  Here's the finished product.



Plaid.♥.

For this project you need, a level, a pen, chalk, several different colors/sheens of paint, tons of tape and a fair amount of perseverance.  (I didn't think to take a picture of these items.)

I started off by deciding that I wanted my first stripes to be 12" wide.  So I measured and marked every twelve inches off on the bottom of the wall.



Then, I took great care to draw lines at 45° angles using the level.  This is where the level in your best friend (or worst enemy depending on how you are feeling about the project so far.)  This is where it is very important to get the lines straight and everything measured correctly, because the rest of the plaid is based off of these measurements and lines.



Since I figured out that there would be diamonds of the base color left after the blue stripes, I decided to go ahead and just tape off diamonds.  This saved me from having to tape stripes in one direction, let them dry, and then tape stripes in the other direction.  This was worth is because of how fat the stripes were.



Here is a critical step to clean paint lines.  Paint the base color over the edge of the tape.  My walls were lavender, so I repainted lavender over the tape lines.  This meant that any tape bleeding would be purple and would mean that once I painted blue over the tape, it would not bleed.  And it worked - beautifully.




After that, I actually painted over my pen lines since I knew the paint I was using was light enough that one coat would probably not cover it.  After that, I started using chalk.  It wipes off and doesn't affect the paint.  Then I painted the blue and took off the paint.



After that, I decided that I wanted alternating blue stripes to be covered with larger glossy stripes.  Unfortunately, this doesn't show up well in pictures, but it is a nice effect to add dimension to the wall.  I measured 3" into the diamonds and drew diamond between the ones that I was turning into stripes.  Then I taped it off and painted the gloss over it.



Then, I decided I wanted double stripes using the wall color from the rest of our house over each blue stripe.  I taped it off using three pieces of tape on each stripe.



After that, I decided to cross those stripes with alternating smaller cream color stripes using the trim color to go over every other section of purple.  I taped those off, painted them, and then went ahead and did the other brown stripes in the other direction.




The last thing I had to do was one more round of the cream colored stripes in that semi-gloss paint that again, adds dimension to the pattern.



And, just like that, you have a plaid wall.




I ♥ mine.

To see how the whole room turned out - click here!