How to paint a bulletin board (because, you know, it's SO hard)

I am that person that, when you come over to visit, I force you to ooh and ahh over my latest project. So if you were coming over today, you’d get to pretend to be really overly thrilled about my bulletin board that I just painted last week with my Handmade Charlotte stencils.

(old ultrasound picture! Not a sly announcement!)

You know how sometimes you have a really great idea for a project and then it’s a total failure?

Last summer, I had the great idea to repaint my totally boring and cheap IKEA bulletin board. (Someday I will have the great idea to learn how to spell “bulletin” without the help of Google, but that day is not today).

It was not a raging success. It hung on my wall, ugly and annoying.

So when I got asked to participate in the Handmade Charlotte stencils campaign, it seemed like the perfect time to try again with this thing. I mean, it couldn’t get worse than this could it?

Happily, it did not.

how to paint a bulletin board

Acrylic paint in three colors
Stencils
Paintbrush
Painting tape
Pencil

I painted the middle all black (to be honest, it’s chalkboard paint, but I’m about the one person alive who hates chalkboard paint mainly because I hate chalk and the accompanying screeeeeeching and dust so so much. It just happened to be the only black paint I owned).

Then I taped around the edge to protect my black coat and painted the edge yellow. The hardest part of this was fending off Ella who DESPERATELY wanted to help with my “art project.”I let it dry, then drew an outline of the stencil in pencil, and filled it in with white paint. Voila! I kind of love having the thought bubble there right above the cards I keep on the bottom edge. And I like that it doesn’t scream at you like that blue stripe did on the previous one. I might have retinal burn still from it.

I love the designs on these Handmade Charlotte stencils but I actually had a miserable time using them. They’re made of cardboard, which means that if you try to paint with them, they’ll get all soft and pretty much unusable. I ended up spraying mine with acrylic sealer before I used them which seemed to help, but they still didn’t lay flat enough to give me a really nice crisp stencil. My only alternative was to use it as an outline, draw the shape with a pencil and then manually paint it in. Not really what I’m looking for in a stencil, although I can see myself using them occasionally for paper crafts (like drawing a shape onto a card, or something).

Worst case scenario, I’ll just let Ella knock herself out using them – that girl’s never met a craft project she didn’t like.

I wrote this post as part of a sponsored campaign with Plaid and The Blueprint Social. All opinions in this post are my own.

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