Shopping In My Own House

BEFORE                                                                     AFTER


Most of you know by now that, when I get to decorating my house, I tend to run around my house looking for things I'm not using and re-purpose them. I'm in the middle of decorating my guest room, but the colors I chose were dark evergreen, black, white, and silver.  

I found a lamp I wasn't using, but it clearly was more Roman than modern, and I knew I had to at least try to paint it.

First, I thought that maybe kind of "pouncing" it with a sage green would be a good start, then layer black and taupe.

I then tried to "pounce" some black into the creases and all around the base.  I stepped back at this point and realized that, even though I did want it to have black, it was getting really dark.

This is what it looks like up close.  You can see that I still haven't covered all of the brown underneath.  Don't be afraid to paint things!  You can see how it's just sort of pouncing paint all around.  

So then I started adding a light taupe but keeping black in the creases and all around the base.  I ended up liking the lighter taupe better, so virtually none of the green remained when I was done with this color.

Closer view...

And even closer on top...

And a closeup of the bottom.  Sometimes I used a paper towel to wipe off paint to make things look softer.

I found a new lampshade on Amazon for $12.  I like the way it looks against the evergreen wall and on the black night stand. 

I think it works quite well in the new guest room - way better than the "before" version!  Don't be afraid to paint things.  You can always paint over them!  I'd love to see your favorite projects, too!

White on White Canvas

While I'm in the middle of redecorating/reaccessorizing my home, I decided to make a few meaningful canvases for my bookshelf.  I found this one intriguing.  This white-on-white thing is kinda trendy right now, and I wanted to see if I could do it.

First, you have to have a canvas board the size you'd like for the place you'll be putting it (I found mine at Joann's).  Then, you need to decide what to write on it.  In my case, I decided to write "I love you" in as many languages as I find interesting.  After the romance languages, I also included fun things, like all languages that make up the genetics of our family - and even wonderfully geeky things like elven, troll, and even pig latin. ;-)

I used Word to type out all of the different "I love yous," then decided that I wanted them all in different fonts, so I played with that for a while until I liked the fonts.  Then I played with the sizes of each different language phrase.  This is all a bit of trial and error and depends solely on your taste and preferences.  You could do the entire board in one font and one size and not go through any of that: it's totally up to you.  You could even just put one poem or phrase on the entire board.  Whatever makes you happy.

Below, you'll see that I printed out all of the phrases and cut them out.  I put a piece of cling wrap over my canvas and started laying out the placement of the phrases.  This is what I came up with.  I glued them down with a glue stick onto the cling wrap.  This is your layout.

Next, lay a piece of wax paper over your word layout and use white puff paint to trace them.  You will get some of the letters wrong - don't worry, just make more until you're happy with them.  You do not have to paint over them in the same order as the layout.  You are just making the letters here. If you don't like a letter, make another one right next to it.  Let everything dry overnight.  

I put a piece of black material underneath so you could see the letters better.  You can see how I messed up on a few letters and re-did them.  You can also see how they can be easily peeled off.

When the paint is dry, you can start carefully peeling them off and placing them directly onto the canvas in the order of your layout.  In this photo, I have the dry painted letters on the left and the mock-up layout on the right to use as a template as I place the letters.  Can you see where I've started placing the letters on the canvas?

The letters should peel off pretty easily.  If you have any problems, just remember that you can always make more.

Here, I have placed all of the letters according to my template (well, for the most part - you can see some are still crooked).  You can see they aren't perfect yet.  I pushed them around with a toothpick for a while until I had them exactly where I wanted them.

Then I carefully used Mod Podge to glue the letters down.  When they were all glued down, I put a couple more layers of Mod Podge over the top of them.

This is the finished product.  It's much easier to read in person.  LOL  My favorite part is that people tend to do a double take when realizing there are words on the canvas.  

If you don't like the white on white, you can always use different colored puff paint for the letters, or even use white puff paint, but paint the entire canvas at the end to make it red on red or green on green, etc.  Anything goes on this one.  Enjoy!

Saving a Dresser from Evil

I recently moved into a great house!  Yay!  But now none of my furniture really fits or matches anything in any of these new rooms.  Soooo, you know what I'm going to do, right?  Repurpose and refurbish!  

I found an amazing and huge old dresser at my favorite "eclectic pieces" store, Rusty Glamour in Battle Ground, WA (shameless plug for my favorite store).  But some demon had rattle-canned it solid white.  Spray painted it!  Blasphemy.  So I saved it from evil and brought it home.  

First and once again, I'm sorry I stink at taking the "before" shots.  For some reason I just can't remember I'm going to document my projects until I've done something to them already. But you can see how this was just sprayed white.  It was sprayed over all of the hardware, too.  ugh 

So I removed the hardware with the intention of making it look like metal again somehow and decided on a worn copper look.  So first I put two coats of copper paint over all of it (the pic shows only the first coat).

After drying, the hardware got dabs of blue and green to make it look aged.  I adjusted with a couple more dabs of copper. They were all then sprayed 3-4 times with clear polyurethane so they won't chip.

Do you see the turquoise wall color behind the dresser?  I mixed that color with half white to cut the color down to a lighter blue and brushed the drawer/door insets with that color (except the bead board, which I wanted to see if I liked leaving it white). 

Then I did some dry brushing all over the dresser.  If you've never dry brushed, it's just dipping your brush barely into the paint, then dabbing it off on a paper towel, newspaper, or rag, and then barely touching the surface as you brush.  It will come out all streaky.  You can go over it as much as you like until you like it visually.  This is very individual.  You can experiment with adding water to your water-based paint and dry brushing with that to see the differences (it's much more subtle).  

For each of the next steps I did one per day:

1.  I dry brushed the whole thing the same blue color from the insets. 

2.  I pretty much solidly painted the whole thing taupe (kind of like painting badly, but a lot more solidly than dry brushing).

3.  I dry brushed a sage green color all over everything.  

4.  The next day, I watered down the sage green, dry brushed and used a rag to kind of smear it, like watercolors, over the top layer.  I also put a solid layer of sage over the blue on the insets (after the family voted the blue was too much).  Here's what it looks like with all the layers.

The reason I like lots of layers is so these come through when you sand it. With 100-grit sandpaper wrapped around a sponge, I sanded all of the edges, the corners, the sides and top of the dresser, and anywhere I though it would look cool and worn.  Sometimes I sanded down to sage, sometimes to blue, to taupe, and even to the original white or down to the wood.  You can see some of the sanding in the insets of the pics above.  

In order to make it look tea-stained, older, and to mellow the colors, I used a polyurethane to seal it that has stain in it.  I used two coats and actually coated the white bead board in the doors (that I hadn't touched yet) so they weren't so WHITE.  Everything looks so much better after this step.  

With the drawers slid back in and the hardware attached, this is how it turned out.  After sliding back up and looking at the original boring white dresser, I'm super happy with this.  And now we have storage we wouldn't normally have had!  

Now, if I could only have hardwood floors in this room....