Stamp of Approval

My favorite project this summer was re-doing our laundry room. My favorite part of that project was the ceiling.

I knew I wanted to do a fun pattern in the room (the laundry room is the perfect place to take a risk since it is small and not a central room in the house!) My first thought was wallpaper, but all the ones I love are just too pricey. So I thought about doing a stencil like this:

image from here

But... we've been there & done that, so I wanted to think of something different. I really liked the wall color, so I decided to focus on the ceiling instead. We had a couple of shades of teal paint samples (one from the bathroom mirror and one that is my parents' exterior door color), so I painted a sample of each color on paper.

I thought about trying to make some sort of stamp (I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find a rubber stamp that would be big enough to make a statement), but figured I would check out Hobby Lobby's stamp aisle just in case. 

 

This guy caught my eye immediately. Bonus: it was less than $5 thanks to a 40% coupon I pulled up on my phone!

Next came a trip to Home Depot for some metallic gold paint (which was a little more expensive than I planned since the shade I wanted only comes in the quart size, not in the small sample jars)

I used an old small brush to brush the paint onto the stamp and did a little trial stamping on my painted paper samples.

I decided that I liked the darker, more smudged stamp look and that I should just GO FOR IT on the ceiling. Worst case scenario: it's not a big space to paint over. 

So I painted the ceiling the teal color and after spending a couple days putting up crown molding, I was ready to plan out the spacing of the stamps. I kind of liked the spacing on the rough draft sample, so I measured the distance between each stamp and made a template from a grocery bag & hole punch:

I started at the corner of the ceiling and held up the template, making a pencil dot in each hole. I just overlapped the holes and kept going in rows until the whole ceiling was covered with (not quite) evenly-spaced dots. 

You can't see the dots very well, but I promise they are there. After I rested my neck for awhile, I started the stamping. 

It actually went pretty quickly, thanks to a good Pandora station. The actual stamping took less than 2 hours.

The paint was the perfect shade of gold and I am absolutely THRILLED with the results. Who would have thought that a 5-dollar stamp from Hobby Lobby would completely change the look of our laundry room? The best part is the metallic shine that really brings your attention to the ceiling.

Obsessed. So worth the risk! More laundry room pics to come...