Painted Headboard

I talked about the hows and whys of changing the boys' room in this post.
 
Today I'm just going to explain how I made the red stripe on the painted headboard without measuring.

I did use a level to make the navy rectangle. Pretty standard stuff. But I wasn't about to measure and use the level and mark to figure out my red line. Too much work.

First, I bought one and half inch wide painter's tape because that is about how far in from the edge I wanted the line to be.

Source

I placed the tape right on the edge of the navy blue all the way around. Then to get a crisp edge I burnished the tape with my finger nail, but you could use a tool such as a popsicle stick. Just rub down the edge. I don't have a picture because it hadn't yet occurred to me to do a post on this when I did that stage. Oops.

(Walls aren't smooth and painter's tape is designed to grip very lightly, so you burnish to force the tape into all the mini divets in the wall.)

I settled on a 1.5" stripe of red, so I tore bits of tape and spaced them out around the first tape line. I lined the edge of the tape bits to the edge of the tape line.

Then it was time to take advantage of the straight line quality of tape. I simply connected the dots, so to speak. My next tape line was placed carefully along the edge of the tape bits.

I used an x-acto knife to trim tape that when over.

Once in place, I removed the tape bits which were now sandwiched between my long tape lines. I then burnished the tape.

For such a small space I just bought a sample size of red paint. It did take five coats to go over that dark navy color. But red usually takes at least three coats anyway.

Once the paint was dry, I pulled off the tape. I pull straight off. Not at an angle either way, just straight.