Inspiration from the mundane...

A few years ago, when Bunny was small, I was painting what would become her new bedroom. I was indulging my girliness and love of pink by using pale pink above the dado rail, a shade darker below. And even though I thought them the perfect shades of pink, it all seemed so typical for a girl’s room. I wanted to inject some sort of personality, make it a bit unique.

I was making her bed when I took new notice of the fairies adorning her pillowcase corners

This didn’t inspire me to learn embroidery, that came years later. And no, I didn’t feel the need to buy a sewing machine, either. I don’t even think I was crocheting at this point...but I did have a few little tubes of paint, and I had been revamping furniture and painting rooms for years

So I took inspiration from the pillowcase and painted a fairy at the top of Bunny’s closet. I’m no artist, but I can manage a stick figure! She is about two inches long.

She was joined by some friends

I love fairies, and I had to sneak some into her room. When she was little and was afraid to go to sleep on her own, I told her the fairies would look after her. She liked that.

Then I went into overdrive with the decorative accents and got to the closet doors and dado rail

She was all smiles when she saw this (thank goodness!) and even now, at nearly 10 years old, she loves these details. She even said when she wants more “grown-up” colours on her walls, I have to paint little circles around the fairies so they are always there...

The way I see it, do something different, it’s fun! And really, it’s just a few tester pots of paint – if it doesn’t turn out right, paint over it!

With the closet doors, I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d do, so I started with pink polka dots. Dip a little paintbrush into paint, tap it onto the door. Took about five minutes. Then I thought some stripes would be nice, so a fatter brush in blue paint (I did measure the spaces in between the stripes to make sure they were a bit even).

The flowers are simply blobs of paint swirled together – pink dabbed on top of the green stem, then a red blob dabbed in the middle of pink and stirred a bit with the tip of the brush. I did similar all the way around on the dado rail, and pink polka dots on the skirting board.

This room is crazy girly, I know, but I wanted to show you what can be done with regular acrylic paint tubes and some inexpensive brushes (honestly, the brush I used for the roses was an old lipstick brush – I decided to do roses in the evening after shops were closed, but I didn’t want to wait until morning to buy a teeny brush!) Dots and stripes and doodles can be adapted to any colour scheme, and stars or other shapes could be substituted for flowers in a boy’s room.

I am seriously considering painting a wee fairy somewhere else in the house, like in the kitchen or a corner of the sitting room, and not telling anyone. See who spots it first. What do you think?

Happy crafting!

Chrissie x