Interior Design: DIY Moroccan-Style Wall Stencil Tutorial

DIY Moroccan-Style Wall Stencil Tutorial

**UPDATE! If you have any trouble making your walls snazzy, visit my FAQ post on this tutorial. I got lots of questions, so there're all here for you should you need some help.**

I jazzed up my wall with a DIY Moroccan-style pattern. And, the best part about this project?... it was completely free. One Pampers box and some leftover paint later and I really like my wall :)

1. Find a Moroccan-ish shape you like online and print it out whatever size you want (Google images is a good place to go). The larger you go... the less work it is. I had to tile mine onto 4 sheets of paper, then tape them together. Don't worry about the design being all blurry if it is, you can fix that in a minute. Once it's all taped, fold the paper in quarters and cut out your shape. When you unfold it, you will have a symmetrical pattern even if it started off blurry. Here is the shape I used if you want to do the same.

Originally I was going to add that center shape as well until I started tracing, and realized I was insane.

2. Trace your shape onto cardboard and cut it out. This is where my Pampers box (and assistant) came into play.

3. Step 3 is an important one, and I think the reason I had no wonky pattern happening. I taped a level to my stencil. This way, I traced it onto the wall perfectly straight every time. Worked out awesome.

4. Pick a spot on your wall to start tracing lightly with a pencil. I eyeballed where my stencil would end up on each end of the wall and made sure I started in a place that would have me end in a half pattern on each side. Did that make sense? It really doesn't matter. I just preferred no tiny slivers on the sides.

(In these pictures I already went over some of my pencil lines with the paint)

5. Once you traced everything with a pencil, (took me a few nights while they snoozed) grab a small brush and go over the lines with paint. That's it!

My lines are not perfect but no one is going to look that closely. :)

I'm sad to say that just a few weeks after I finished my wall... we sold our house and moved! (Which explains the lack of posts in a while... and the crappy iPhone picture of the "after") Oh well. It was good practice and I will definitely be doing this again in our next house. I love how it turned out.

If you're in to easy and inexpensive DIYs, here's a few more I've done around my house.