Using the Whimsical Dala Muses Stencils on Vintage Benches

Over the holidays the lovely Goedele from Dala Muses sent me some of her Scandinavian inspired stencils and I was immediately in love ❤️

I am always drawn to anything Scandinavian inspired (maybe since my dad was born in Sweden) and I’m a sucker for anything with a bird so these couldn’t have been any more perfect in my world! I had a project in mind for the stencils when they arrived but wanted a little colour inspiration so pulled out my copy Swedish Interiors to see what caught my eye.

The Inspiration

As I flipped through the book I kept coming back to this gorgeous cabinet and its beautiful colours.  If you look closely at the cabinet, you can see that it has several shades of blue in the pattern with yellow highlights.  How pretty are those colours?

The Vintage Benches

Onto the benches… I have had these two vintage benches for almost two years and they were in desperate need of a makeover.  I found them back on this vintage finds hunt.

The yellow one was so icky it even had a cat and mice painted on top… no thanks!  Definitely, definitely time for a makeover for these two. To start, they both got two coats of Fusion Mineral Paint in Limestone.  Then it was onto the stencils!

As I wanted to use several different colours with both stencils, I did each colour separately, let it dry, and then layered on the next colour.  For both pieces, I started with the Midnight Blue.

The Floral Tile Stencil

 When placing my tiles, I left a little space between each one. I liked how that made the tiles look natural – as if they might have grout between them.  If you prefer though, the tile stencil can be put directly next to the ones around it and it would create a perfect little flower.

 I layered on the yellow next and started with Butter Cream.  Since the Butter Cream was a little pale, I used a brush, after it was dry, to highlight the flowers with a touch of Prairie Sunset. I finished the long bench with some Little Whale lines and added a dot of it in the middle of the navy flowers to break up the white spaces.

The Scandi Bird Stencil

For the smaller bench, I used the bird stencil for the middle and the tile stencil for the corners.  The same process was used to layer the colours as with the tile stencil. To create a full image in the centre, I angled the stencil slightly to the right for one side and then flipped it over and angled it slightly to the left for the other side.  Flipping the stencil and using it again gave me two birds facing each other and filled the benchtop nicely. Aren’t these the prettiest stencils?  I am completely in love with my Scandinavian inspired benches 💛  They don’t even look like the same benches thanks to the Dala Muses stencils! 

Currently, the Dala Muses stencils are not available in North America but I am hoping they will be very soon!!  (*fingers crossed*)  Oh, and if you have not checked out the Dala Muses blog yet, I would highly recommend it.  It is one of my very favourites.

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