Whimsical Words: A Baseball Wall

We don't own this home we live in, but we give thanks for it every day! I do not take it for granted! I am so thankful to the family who shares generously this home and the hundreds of acres that surround it. And I am thankful for the Red Door!

When you don't own a home, but you want to make it your own, painting is an easy way to do that. So we did some updates... actually it started with the girls room, which had been a boring tan. I made it yellow with the help of my sister, easy peasy!

But the living room and the halls and the kitchen were also the same shade of boring brownish tan and while it works for some people, it just put me in the doldrums. So we started with the living room which we did a bright white with a tint of blue to it and accented one wall with a dark blue! So we had a lot of dark blue leftover and I thought it was a great boy color and decided to paint my son's room with the rest of the dark blue paint (His room had been a sickening pale green).

And all dark walls make a room a little dark and depressing and a lot scary at night when you are just 8, so from the get go, he wasn't too happy about it. He complained occasionally and then got used to it and just lived with it ... and then I found THIS great idea on Pinterest and this is where the story begins. It was perfect because I didn't want to repaint the whole room, this idea was just one wall!

We started with primer because we were covering such a dark wall... well a quart was not enough so the project was delayed a bit so I could get more primer and do a second coat (it was a dark blue). Then we painted it was a Lowes color called "Nightlight." I thought that might be a good color to make a room not quite so dark at night!

Then my husband thought it should be all proportionate to a real baseball and I started to panic that it was going to be an awful project. So I started with a pencil on a string to get a nice arch on the wall... It still took me multiple tries and then I had the fun of erasing pencil marks from the freshly painted wall... :(

Take my advice, go buy a sample of tan paint, don't try to create a shade with what you have on hand... so here are the seams, looking a little pink, with eraser streaks all over the wall! I was kinda tempted to quit at this point, but I also know that as much as I hate the process, I almost always love the end result, so I kept going!

and then it comes time to paint the stitches, with a nice sponge brush, in red (of which we did buy a sample) ...just little birds in the sky all the way down the seam. Also had some panic, perfectionist moments while doing this.