Our Beehives get the "Craft Stencil Treatment"!

Stenciling a home for bees

This year Greg and I decided to add honeybees to our garden. Why bees? Well, because over 75% of all our food is pollinated by bees! Did you know that? And bees have been declining in the recent years worldwide due to pesticides leading to colony collapses. Since we are avid gardeners and grow many veggies and fruits for our table, we thought: "why not support the bees that do so much for us" and ended up getting our very own bee hives. After getting our beehives from Betterbee, we just had to take it a step further and give our bees a very special beautiful stenciled home. Bee-lieve it or not (sorry just had to do it!) bees are quite visual creatures and are very sensitive to pattern. So, our stenciled beehives aren't just pleasing to the eye, but the crisp patterns help our bees to better find their way home. Greg and I had such a fun time testing out our new craft stencils on our beehives, we thought that you might enjoy a little beehive stenciling tutorial!

Materials and Stencils we used:

-Cutting Edge Stencils Craft Stencils: Casablanca Small, Zagora, Shipibo, Fusion, Zamira and Aladdin -Benjamin Moore Aura Paint in Douglas Fir (background) and Tequila Lime (stencil color) -Dense Foam Roller w/ Handle, Styrofoam Plates, 5/8" Stencil Brush, Blue Painters Tape and Paper Towel

Preparation before stenciling

We bought our beehives assembled but unpainted so first we painted all exteriors with Benjamin Moore Douglas Fir. You can prime them if you would like but we just skipped the primer and went straight for the background color, because we don't mind if the paint fades over time. If you are concerned about the paint being weather resistant, you can use outdoor paint. Once the base coat has dried, we poured some Tequila Lime paint (makes you want to have a Margarita, doesn't it?) onto a styrofoam plate. Then we evenly loaded a dense foam roller with paint and immediately off-loaded any excess paint onto a paper towel.

Getting your stencil on

We decided to stencil each hive box with a different stencil pattern. Yeah, a little crazy, but we didn't want the hives to be boring so we just went for it and we're glad we did. Here we're taping the Fusion Craft stencil with some blue tape (no stencil adhesive was used) and simply rolling over it with a foam roller. Some minor paint bleed does occur without spray adhesive, but it still looked great to us.

Always check your stenciled work

When stenciling, it's a good idea to check how is it going and to lift up a corner to make sure that you have achieved the paint coverage that you want. If there is some bleed behind the stencil, don't worry - you can always come back later and do a little bit of retouching. As I said, we personally don't mind small imperfections and from a few feet away, it looks perfect anyway. But proper off-loading of the roller and using less paint really helps to prevent paint bleed.

One down, seven more to go

This is a completed box using our Zagora Craft stencil. Doesn't it look awesome? Now, 7 more boxes to stencil!

Stenciled Beehives Side by Side

These are our completed beehives. We are so happy with them and love how the trendy green colors fit in so nicely with the surrounding garden. In fact, green is the color of the upcoming year 2013 and is super trendy right now. Greg and I particularly love how our hives are pretty much the exact same color as young emerging green foliage.

Bees are moving in!

After stenciling the exteriors of the beehives, it was time to fill the interiors with their new inhabitants, our bees! It's actually easy and not at all scary, because the bees are very calm and friendly (yeah, I know we look like space aliens in that gear!).

Zamira Craft Stenciled box

This hive body is stenciled in our Zamira Craft stencil pattern. It looks so cute! We hope that we've got the happiest bees around. How could they not love their new fun stenciled homes? In fact, we named our hives Casablanca and Zamira, after the stencil patterns we used.

DIY Stencil Beehive Project Completed

Here I am with the completed beehives. This was such a fast and fun DIY project. We finished it in only a few hours and it was so worth it. To see more details, please watch our Beehive Stenciling video! Thank you for stopping by and be sure to check in again soon! You can definitely use these Craft stencils to embellish the drawers for dressers, night stands and side tables. They are basically the same as our beehive boxes and just as easy to stencil on! Craft stencils are also great for DIY pillows, curtains and even floor mats! What to do now?

• - Please visit our Facebook page for more customer photo inspiration and to share your own photos!
• - Follow "CESTENCILS" on Pinterest to see our latest trend spottings, new stencils, tutorials and employee mood boards.
• - Shop for CRAFT STENCILS to free your creativity!

Stay tuned for many more posts! Thanks for stopping by! Yours truly, ~Gabi, Janna, Greg and the Cutting Edge Stencils Crew