Lovely! but steep learning curve for beginners
"This stencil is gorgeous, and we're very pleased with the results so far!! That said, we have had a steep (and expensive) learning curve. I definitely would not recommend this stencil for beginners. We are/were total newbies, so we watched lots of videos & tried to follow all of the recommendations. Unfortunately. . . our first two stencils were ruined by the paint we bought, apparently because it has primer in it. Our Benjamin Moore dealer said they no longer make "Ben" paint in a flat finish (one of this website's recommendations). So we just went to the higher level of Regal Select in Flat finish. Big mistake. And I mean total disaster. It took us 3 DAYS to just get one and a half columns of this stencil on a wall (crown molding to baseboard). Despite using the dry technique, the paint quickly got yucky (apparently due to primer) & the stencil needed to be cleaned. We would get seepage because the foam roller would stick to the paint on the stencil, pulling it off the wall (despite the spray adhesive & painters tape holding it to the wall) & contributing to the maddening seepage. We could not get the Regal Select paint off the stencils. It took literally an hour every time we tried to clean a stencil, and scraping with our finger nails was the only way to get any of the paint off. It was awful beyond words & totally exhausting bending over a bathtub for an hour trying to scrape just one stencil. In the end, those first two stencils were ripped (probably from trying to clean them & from being pulled away from the wall by the paint with primer) & never got clean. We thought about giving up & just painting over what we had done, but. . . After licking our wounds (and some tears on my part), we purchased 2 new stencils and tried a different paint. The FolkArt Matte Acrylic (craft paint from Michaels) worked way better for us, although it is a pain buying a million little 2ml bottles (they don't make Titanium White in a bigger size, unfortunately). A lovely person at Cutting Edge suggested that we try Motsenbockers Lift Off to clean the stencils, and that has helped immensely in terms of removing the built up paint when cleaning. The spray adhesive never really comes off, unfortunately. Speaking of the adhesive, you definitely need it for this stencil! There are so many intricate little areas that the spray adhesive is required to try to minimize seepage. For anyone who is curious, this is Benjamin Moore Finley Blue as a base. We started with Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace as the stencil color, then switched after the disastrous results. The FolkArt Matte Acrylic in Titanium White is not quite as bright (even after doing a million layers!), but it is close enough that the (small) area that got Chantilly Lace isn't super noticeable. Overall, we're very pleased! But fair warning: it it is a LOT of work. We're doing the whole room, which is not for the faint of heart - ha. The fireplace just about did us in, so we'll be working on that the next time we have a stencil weekend. 😅 Oh, one last thing - I picked this stencil because 1. it is lovely, and 2. it is one of the only stencils I've seen that doesn't align horizontally (right next to previous column) when you repeat. The walls in this 230 year old room are wonky (higher on one side than the other side), so I needed something that wasn't going to be aligned right next to each other or else it would have been obvious that something was off when the tops of each column were different. We did not even attempt to stencil the corners (not a single right angle in the entire house). When we're finished, we're going to put picture molding all around it, so that is why we stopped a bit before the edges. It's not perfect! But we love it, and we're calling it a qual. 😅"
