Anyway, it took me about 2-2.5 hrs. from start to finish to complete the design on two walls of her room.  I will probably repeat the design under her second window later too.  The pictures are below if you’d like to look.  Here’s how I did it:

1. Sketched the design free hand on the walls with white chalk.  Used a simple, mod-ish graphic design of poppies inspired by some decals I found on etsy.  You could probably print out a design or use a stencil and trace it instead of free hand drawing it.

2.  Took a huge piece of kids basic drawing paper and traced the design elements in pencil.  I just grabbed the thinnest paper we had- tracing paper would probably work great.  White chalk was hard to see, but it doesn’t need to be perfect- just a sense of the scale is important.  Made tracing of leaf, flower head (circle with small circle in middle) and stems of 4 different sizes.  All leafs on the stems are from the same pattern of a leaf.  All flower heads are from same pattern as well.  To vary the stem length, just have a pattern of the longest stem you want to use and cut it off shorter to fit your design if you want.

3.  Took tracings and cut them out and then traced them on the back of the contact paper, which has grid lines to help you if you want things to be exactly straight. DO NOT use pen because it smudges and I had it get on my sticky fingers many times and then on the clean white side of the contact paper, forcing me to throw out a lot of it!  Once I changed over to pencil and washed my hands frequently, especially before hanging them, the smudge problem went away.

The stems are intentionally not exactly straight and a little wavy.  The flower heads are pretty round, but nothing needs to be perfect for this design.  Its kind of whimsical, so the more imperfections the better- no need to stress and get things perfect!  The stems are different lengths to give a little variety in height among the flowers.

4.  Peel off backing and stick to wall where chalk design was drawn.  Make sure to wipe off the majority of the chalk design before or after sticking to the wall.  It comes off with a damp hand or slightly damp cloth.  The contact paper I got from Target is pretty low tack and can peel off once stuck to reposition, which was great.  However, due to the low tack, sometimes it didn’t stick good if there was too much chalk residue on the wall behind it.  The chalk was a nice guide.  Smooth out the contact paper with the back of your hand from the center out.  Also make sure to peel the backing off real slowly because if I did it fast, it would wrinkle the decal and I couldn’t get the wrinkles out because the paper was so thin and delicate.  Then, you’re done!

Anyway, I am pleased with the results.  There are more pictures on flickr too!

So, with the new room we created for the babies (which, now ended up being Lucy’s new room because we can’t fit two cribs in there!), we want to again do something different.  We chose Lilac for the wall colors and white for the trim and wanted to do some stenciling.  However, how does one make their own stencil quickly?  Again, it wasn’t our style to use the commercial roses, ivy, ,etc. stencils that are out there in most craft stores and by the time I searched around for plastic to cut a stencil so Jason could paint it… well you get the picture.  Plan B was for me to again free hand draw the design on the wall (by the way, chalk is an excellent way to mark on walls without erasing, etc.  It just rubs off and its nice and white so you can see it easily on any colored wall).

So, we chose a mod bigger than life kind of poppy pattern or something like that to go around the windows and walls of the room patterned after some incredible vinyl wall art decals we found on Etsy.  Etsy had so many to choose from, it literally took us a while to narrow down what we were looking for. Again, the plan was to freehand the design on the walls and paint it in later.  Then….

Jason found this link on how to make removeable, DIY vinyl wall art!  Duh!  All those college years of contact paper in apartment drawers will finally come in handy.  I am on the hunt today for white contact paper and I’ll let you know how it goes.  Best of all, if it works, it’ll be faster, less messy, no paint fumes and removable down the line.  I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.  Anyone done this before?