PracticalBeautiful: DINING ROOM - Patchwork Feature Wall (Paint-by-numbers)

Wednesday, 28 December 2011

DINING ROOM - Patchwork Feature Wall (Paint-by-numbers)

I've always loved patch work - I imagine I will continue to make them throughout my life as I think they are such a good way of using up scrap unwanted fabrics and making them into, often a memory map, and a beautiful thing to pass through the family. I haven't yet ever done a paint patchwork however, until now...

We have section of wall set back from the rest in our dining room where a door used to be. There is a shelf underneath it and the pantry behind it and it is crying out to be made into some sort of feature. The previous owners decided to use it as a place to put their dart board (nice!) and they obviously weren't very good as the floor and shelf and wall were peppered with tiny holes as a result! We got Tony (our wonderful village decorator) to skim and line this section along with the rest of the room and I re-glossed the shelf which covered up all of the dart damage so then we were ready to create something different.

As ever we are on a budget here so I wanted to do something with items which I already have and what I have is an awful lot of sample paint pots, so using a patchwork quilt as inspiration I decided to do a patchwork feature wall and this is how I did it...

First I measured up the space:

...from which I decided the best quantity of, slightly off, squares (OK rectangles) would be 80- 8 across and 10 down....

Then I looked at colour options...

I knew I wanted to incorporate gold into the pattern, and the other colours just fit around it and in well with the holiday colour pallet of the room.

I then looked at two possible formation options...


ONE LINE ONE WAY AND ONE THE OTHER WAY, REPEAT...

AND MOVING EACH COLOUR ALONG BY ONE ON EACH LINE...

The thing which put me off the first option was that I wanted the gold to be spread out well across the pattern and it would only appear in the middle of the design in a chequer board effect with the SEA SERPENT if I did it that way, Adam also preferred the second option so I decided to go with that.

I gave each colour a number to make up a "paint-by-numbers" template on the wall which would be easy to follow. I then numbered them all on my mock up and on each of the paint pots...

Now I just had to template my design on the wall...

I numbered each square on the wall too so that my template was really easy to follow.

I then masked off all the, soon to be, gold squares as I was painting these with spray paint, the rest were coming from sample pots so I would fill in individually by hand...