I've always regretted not bringing a bone inlay chest of drawers back from my time in India.
I’ve always regretted not bringing a bone inlay chest of drawers back from my time in India. I love the style and so appreciate the craftsmanship involved in producing such an intricate piece of furniture.
Needing a budget of $3-4k to buy something here I decided to try stencilling my own version, figuring I could paint over the top if it didn’t work out.
Authentic Indian bone inlay chest from Anthropologie
So I bought a fabulous stencil kit from Cutting Edge Stencils, unsurprisingly called Indian Inlay Furniture Stencil Kit and love the results!
This wasn’t your average ‘take a piece of found furniture and paint it’ sort of project. It took time to find the right chest of drawers that had features I could work with.
What I was looking for was a chest with rails between the drawers. Most chests I found had drawers stacked on top of each other and these don’t allow you to use your stencils to frame each drawer. The best ones I found were white, so first step was to paint to black. I just did a quick spray paint for this.
Then I marked up each drawer and the top using square rulers and one of the kids set squares and set about the task of applying many small stencils, many, many times over. This isn’t a job to attempt as a first stencil project.
I tried both stencil bristle brush and foam and found foam to be best for the job. There were many times the stencil didn’t lie completely flat and the foam brush gave a sharper result. Horses for courses!
It has been a labour of love and taken a few sessions (sometimes with months inbetween – yikes!) to complete, but now it is done and has pride of place in my entry.
I added handmade Indian ceramic handles and a clear satin spray to finish the job.
This is the top. You can’t get everything perfect but these stencils were great to work with and gave so many options to create a great looking stencil version of a beautiful Indian bone inlay chest.
A word of advice, I love my chalk paints, but not for stencils. Their superhero like adhesion qualities stick to stencil acetate too – and you want to clean your stencils regularly to keep nice sharp edges.