Whimsical is the new black

It's done!  It's done!  It's done!  I can't believe it (and you probably can't either), but the much-prolonged stencil project is finally finished.  I feel like I should open some bubbly or something.  (But let's not kid ourselves, I'd probably be doing that anyway.)

Last week I did about half the hallway, and ended here:

I finally had some more time to work on this this past weekend.  I hung up some more newspapers to plan out the different heights of the flowers, and then did some sketching to figure out what angles I wanted them to bend and which colors I wanted to use.  It all worked pretty well, but there was a certain amount of making it up as I went along - thankfully, no real disasters occurred.  

I didn't take any process photos this time around, so I'll just show you what the end result was.  Here's a little sliver between the door to my bedroom and the door to the laundry room.

And here's another little sliver on the other side of the laundry room door, with the hall closet door on the left.  This was a tricky one to do, trying to cross the point where the wall angles back and keeping the angle of the flower consistent.  Anytime I got too close to a corner or a door or anything, doing the stencil became harder because the stencil couldn't lie flat on the wall and had to really be held down by hand to make sure it stayed in place.  The stem on the lighter-colored flower got a little wonky at the very end of it, and I had to restart the dark brown flower three different times because of issues with the paint being runny, but it's probably the kind of stuff that nobody besides me would ever notice because you wouldn't look at something that closely.  Or maybe I'm just rationalizing...

Thank God there was also a big flat wall in this round of painting!  Having the bigger "canvas" to work on made it more fun, but also more daunting to figure out what the composition would look like.  I just felt like there was a lot more room for error because your eye is drawn so much more to these big walls, but hopefully it turned out okay.

So here's what the hall looking toward the living room now looks like.  You can see the first little sliver I showed you in the bottom right corner of this photo.

And here's another shot looking in the opposite direction.  Sorry for the weird lighting in all of these photos, by the way - this space is tough to photograph because there's some natural light that comes in, but it's really quite dark when the overhead light isn't on.  And when you do turn the light on, there's kind of a glare because it's such a small space.  Wah wah.

So far it's been really fun to have it all up on the walls!  It's kind of like walking through a little garden when I walk down to my bedroom.  It's whimsical, but not goofy (I don't think).  So now that I have my little art project on the walls, there's just a couple remaining things that I want to do to "finish" the hallway.  One is to get rid of this light.

It's old-fashioned, ugly, and just totally out of place in my new magical fairyland hallway.  It must go!  I mean, seriously, look at this thing.

Gross.  So I think that's next up on my list.  Someday I think I'd like to re-tile that floor and make it less antiseptic-feeling, but that's probably a ways off.