Friday, March 28, 2014

What I’ve been up to…

If you are looking for perennials, garden décor, furniture, hand painted signs, or a little of everything, mark your calendar for May 1st! We (my mom, sis & I) are having our annual plant/garage sale May 1st, 2nd & possibly 3rd. I purposely haven’t scheduled any tea parties until then so I have plenty of time to prepare for this event!

I have a decent accumulation of crafts, furniture, etc. waiting for me in the shop where I store any bargains I find throughout the year and have been working on giving some of these items makeovers.

Here are a few of them in “before” and “after” pics…

 

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I didn’t get a “before” picture of this but here’s the after..

 

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I spotted this hutch at a local thrift store and saw some character with the beaded back and minus the railing…

 

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I painted a French sign for my sister’s kitchen.. It says something like “toasted butter custard”. I thought it sounded yummy!

 

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My niece had a birthday just recently so I painted this bench, which was black, and added the French wording…

 

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I am very excited to have tried a new technique to transfer this writing onto the bench using wax paper.  I saw this on a blog post by Lena Schlabach at Relaxnchic. She also redid a little bench using this method. Here is the link to it. For me this is quite a break through since I’ve always used the carbon paper, hand painting method. You can read about that here. I’m sure I’ll still use that technique at times but I really like how this turned out!

It was really quite simple. I got the wording from the graphics fairy. (It needed to be backwards for this technique.) I cut wax paper the size of copy paper (8.5”x11”) and ran that through the printer, printing off the backward lettering. I then quickly taped it onto the bench, inky side down and used the cap end of a marker to rub it off. It did smudge a little but I thought that just added to the effect. One thing I did notice was after I sanded the bench, I wanted to wipe it with a damp cloth and the ink did want to come off. I gave it a good coat of clear spray paint. I would have used polycrylic but didn’t have any on hand. Any clear coat would probably work. That will protect it from coming off.

Whew! I didn’t want to make that so long but I can’t help myself; when I discover something new like this, I need to share with you all!

 

Spring weather has still not hit Ohio, unfortunately, but we are trying to stay patient and still getting a breath of fresh air (although cold) every now and then by going on walks, etc.

 

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I was surprised at the willingness to pose nicely for a shot.. but then things quickly went back to normal…

 

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Smile Thanks for taking the time to visit my blog! I appreciate all of you!

-Mary

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