Hi hi hi. So it's Friday, and we're still purplefying Lou's room. In big ways, it turns out. I mentioned Wednesday that we were planning a completely superfluous paint project in here, based solely on the fact that we had the paint. We'd gone to the hardware store to check out the "oops" paint for other projects, and spotted a sickly/lovely lavender, depending on your personal view. It came home with us, and I began mulling over painting the lower half of Lou's room with it. She's already got a chair rail in there, so it seemed like a natural way to add in more of her fave color, but without disturbing the upper half of the walls, which are home to a bunch of shelves and art and stuff. But I didn't just want it to be plain - where's the fun/torture in that? So I considered making a stencil - maybe chunky arrows? - and stripes, of course, and then thought about Swiss crosses and knew that that was it.

Swiss crosses are all the rage, of course, and I shared this same image as inspiration for our hallway. But, while there are lots of examples like this one, of people achieving great effect with washi or electrical tape, by applying black tape to white walls, there are fewer examples of what I was going for: white crosses on a lavender wall. This was still going to involve lots of tape of course - just painter's tape. So I got started.

You'll notice my crosses aren't perfect. Once it became clear this wasn't ever going to be perfect, I threw the notion to the wind and decided I'd just have fun with a jaunty, off-beat Swiss cross. I did go back and trim a few where I thought long limbs looked a bit wonky, and I used a book - the one on the floor - for measurements, but I didn't stress out about perfect sizing or spacing. Instead, I cut a bunch of roughly equal tape strips at a time and then applied them to the wall.

Pretty quickly, I realized it went faster if I first applied a bunch of vertical strips, spaced by the book, and then went back and applied horizontal strips, rather than applying each entire cross individually. In this manner, I covered the entire room.

Because I figured it didn't need to be perfect, Lou helped, mostly handing me tape, but also applying some crosses. When not helping, she spread out her dollhouse furniture on the bed and hung out until I was done. For the painting part, I exiled her to the living room with some "Laura and Mary."

I started with a (super cheap) brush, going over the trim, corners and baseboards. But I also used the brush to paint over the crosses, swiping in the direction I wanted the tape to adhere - so an Up, Down, Left, Right motion for each cross. Then I went back over everything with two coats of lavender paint.

At this point, I was having serious doubts, both because I hated the color and because it became crunch time. You should always remove painter's tape while your tape is still a bit wet, to prevent any dried paint on the tape from bonding to your dried wall paint and ruining your clean lines. But in this case, I needed to make sure that I wasn't just painting a bunch of tape crosses to the wall, which is what would have happened had I allowed my paint to dry. So I only gave it about 15 minutes between coats, and then about 10 minutes after the second coat before I started prying off the tape crosses.

It wasn't hard to pull the crosses off - my fingernail was sufficient 90% of the time. I also used a tiny flat head screw driver to get things started for the stubborn/drier ones. At this point, the jury was still out. I was happy with how the effect was turning out, and really pleased with my generally clean tape lines. But I wished I had done the whole thing in a nice, soft gray.

But, once I'd peeled all of the crosses off and took a minute to let it soak in, I thought it was pretty adorable. And though I'm not a huge fan of the color, wanna guess who is? Yeah. One little Lou is just thrilled with her purple room. She wrote a song about it (which she sings, with verve, in front of the mirror): "Everything is changing! It's going to be summer and we'll have a baby and my room is PUUUUURRRRPLLLEE." So it ranks up there in life events. I deliberately don't have a final photo for ya - you'll have to wait for Monday for the big "reveal."

In the meantime, in case you missed it, Monday I shared our new brick wallpaper in the front of the house, and Wednesday just one of the many purple DIY projects that have gone into Lou's "new" room: a hand painted heart pillow.