GraceAdkinsDesigns: Winter 2013 Pinterest Challenge! Painting Chevron

It's time for another Pinterest Challenge!!

hosted by...

This summer I purchased a japanese shade like thing made out of pink shutters hinged together at the thrift shop for $10. I didn't have a plan for it, but figured it was a good deal and I could find somewhere to put it. I don't have much pink in my house, so I knew I wanted to paint it another color, but couldn't decide which. Then, I saw on Pinterest someone had painted their wall with a chevron design using painters tape. It looked easy enough so I decided to try it out on my shutters. A friend of mine who just painted her living room grey had a few sample size grey paints that she gave me so I just decided on two different shades of grey and got to work.

Here is the photo I pinned that originally inspired me

from here

Here is my shade before I painted it. I decided to put it in my design room behind my fabric shelf, because the shelves I recently had hanging above the shelf fell and left ugly holes in the wall. This way I could add some texture and interest to that wall and cover up the ugly holes in it. The burlap bag hanging over the shade is an old coffee bean bag I bought at an antique store, I still haven't decided what to do with that. Let me know if you have ideas!

I laid the shade out on an old sheet that I didn't mind getting dirty. I sanded it and then wiped it off with a damp cloth.

Next I painted the shutter with my light grey paint (I ended up having to buy one more sample can of paint for about $3) using a sponge brush. I'm pretty sure any kind of brush would work.

Once the shade was all dry I stood it up and folded it slightly so that I could paint the sides of each shutter.

Using a ruler I measured where the center of each shutter was and taped each one down the middle. It was a little tricky to tape because it's not a flat surface like a wall so you have to make sure you press the tape down into each slat.

Roughly measuring with my ruler I taped diagonal lines three inches apart all the way up.

Finally, the fun part! I painted inside every other diagonal space with my darker grey paint using my sponge brush. I removed the tape after each individual shutter was painted so the paint wasn't too dry and I had a nice clean line.

As you can see, after you remove the tape there is a big unattractive line down the middle, so I taped the points of each section and painted it in free handing the top part of it.

As I pulled off the tape a few areas pulled up grey paint, so I had to go back and touch up a few spots. I'm guessing this is because I didn't do a great sanding job. After doing that for each panel I was finished!