Map Ink Blog

I love stencils, I think it comes from spending our honeymoon in Maryam’s BEAUTIFUL Peacock Pavilions in Marrakech. The stencils at Peacock Pavilions were done by Royal Design Studio. In our last apartment I was inspired by our Moroccan room to do a black and gold pattern on a wall in our old apartment. Last summer we bought a victorian house and I’m really excited to do another stencil piece somewhere. I’m thinking maybe the wall in either our living room or dining room in one of these African patterns from Royal Design Studio. See all of Melanie of Royal Design Studio’s amazing posts on Morocco here.

My Gramma lived in an old house full of treasures, one being Great Aunt Beatrice’s vanity that I thought was the bee’s knees. Gramma always said, “when I die you can have this and you will remember me by it”. She gave it to me when I was in high school and I still have it (and Gramma is still alive and well at 95). It was covered in redish-brown thick varnish and had a vanity mirror. A while back I had to move it into storage where it warped, molded and the mirror broke. We were going to throw it out but I just couldn’t. When we found out I was pregnant we planned to refinish and paint it, turning it into the baby’s dresser / changing table. Dave spent a very, very hot weekend stripping the old varnish off, finishin just in time to realize that it wouldn’t fit in the baby’s room (cribs. are. gigantic). So I got to move it into MY bedroom. Dave’s refinishing job was SO PRETTY that I was quite excited to keep it for myself! The knobs are from a store on the Design*Sponge hardware round up list (a post that came at the perfect time). The mural in the background is painted on a small wall area that juts out, (enclosed in it is an abandoned fire place) on one side of our bedroom. In November 2009 we went to Marrakech for our honeymoon and stayed at Peacock Pavilions. Our bedroom had the most beautiful mural (above) I have ever seen done by Melaine Royal from Modello Design. I wanted to recreate this (in a more simple form) so I purchased this stencil from Royal Design Studio. It couldn’t have been easier to do. The rug in front of the dresser is...