Month: July 2015

I’ll admit it, I am cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs … or Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops.  We don’t have them on hand very often, but gosh I could go for a bowl right now.  But this morning, I am cuckoo for Annie Sloan’s Coco chalk paint instead.

Remember the set I just purchased last week?  Well, after seeing how amazing the bed looked painted in chalk paint, I decided to go the same route on the mirrored dresser.

As a reminder, it started out looking like this …

I’ve got a secret for you.  Mr. Q is back there holding up that mirror!  I photo-shopped his feet out of the picture.  I got him to tilt it a little bit backwards too, so I don’t have to duck out of sight in the mirror.

After some paint and new stain, the dresser now looks like this …

Gadzooks!  Even I am amazed by this transformation, much like I was with the bed.  Since I don’t have Mr. Q back there holding up the mirror in this shot, I did have to duck down low to get myself out of the picture.  You can thank me for doing so, as it was hot and humid and my hair was a fright.

This dresser is quite gorgeous without the distraction of that weird stain job, isn’t it?

The veneered top was in very good shape except for the old finish, so I stripped it, stained it with Varathane Dark Walnut gel stain, and then waxed it.  The wood is quite lovely now.

You can see that I left those odd flowers on the top drawers.  I debated removing them like I did on the bed, but in the end I felt like the paint disguised them fairly well.  I also left the original hardware.  It was all there and it had a lovely patina, so it stayed.

I always having trouble deciding whether or not to keep the mirrors on these sorts of dressers.  I did a little research and I couldn’t find a single instance where Miss Mustard kept a mirror like this, although she has done many dressers that are similar to this and must have once had mirrors.  I feel like these pieces are more versatile without their mirror.  Without a mirror this could be used in a dining room, a family room (with a TV on top) or it could be turned into a bathroom vanity.

Plus, it looks great without it too.

But it seemed like such a shame to discard the mirror on this one.  It’s very pretty.  Here’s a better shot showing the detail on the mirror.

Of course, whoever buys it will have the option of removing the mirror.  But I often find that people can’t see past something that is there in front of them.  Or, maybe they will feel like I do, that you can’t just discard the mirror.  Hopefully this piece will find a buyer either way.

This piece went out to Reclaiming Beautiful in Stillwater this week.  And for those of you who are local, do you know about the St. Croix River Valley Vintage Crawl taking place this weekend?

Eight vintage shops in the area (My Sister’s Cottage, Mama’s Happy, Reclaiming Beautiful, Le Garage Girls, Farmhouse Inspired, Hello the House, 3:17 Vintage Furniture & Home Decor and Eye Candy REfind) are participating in the crawl.  Check out the details here!

One drizzly evening last week Mr. Q and I picked up a lovely bedroom set.  This is one of my craigslist secret tips.  I hesitate to even share it here, because the competition for craigslist pieces has gotten seriously fierce in my neck of the woods.  Maybe I should start keeping my secrets tips to myself!  But no, here it is.  I often search for bedroom sets instead of individual pieces.  They might seem expensive at first glance, but if you break down the cost per piece they can sometimes be a great deal.  Plus there is the added bonus of getting multiple pieces in one trip.  Time and gas saving!

This set included a full sized bed,

a tall gentlemen’s dresser,

and a lady’s dresser with mirror.

Personally, I think the coloration on these pieces is quite hideous.  OK, maybe hideous is a strong word … but …  well, yep, hideous.  The dark shadowing around the edges is a total turn off for me.  And then there is this odd looking flower detail.

You can’t see it as well on the dressers, but they both have it too.  Gack!  The green center just boggles the mind.  Isn’t it kind of creepy?

But I had a sneaking suspicion that these pieces could be quite beautiful with a paint job.  The prettier details that were barely noticeable before really pop now.

See?

The difference is night and day, don’t you think?

I chiseled the weird flower from that raised circle on the foot board and replaced it with a 1902 stencil.

But first I had to use some Tough Coat Sealer just on this raised circle because the black kept bleeding through my paint.

Speaking of paint, this is a custom mixed Annie Sloan chalk paint color.  I used about 1/3 Louis Blue, 1/3 Pure White and 1/3 Old White.  Then I topped it off with a smidge of French Linen (grey) to tone town the ‘sweetness’ of the Louis Blue.

While we are on the subject of tweaking colors, let’s talk about white balance and how it messed up the color in my photos of this bed.  Do you use the white balance setting on your camera?  I know that the professionals calibrate their white balance for the exact conditions of their photo shoot.  I’ve done that with my camera, but I seldom get it right that way.  I’m a total amateur!  However, I do frequently change between the ‘canned’ white balance settings on my camera; sunny, shady, cloudy, tungsten light, and fluorescent light instead of using the ‘auto’ white balance setting.  Sometimes you have to play around with them to get the right setting for your conditions.  I find that in many cases I need the “sunny” setting even when I’m in the shade.  The two photos above were taken using the sunny setting, and as you can see, they were taken in the shade (but with a sunny background behind the subject).  The color in them is fairly accurate to the piece itself, except I think the color is a bit lighter in person.  A pale blue with not a lot of green in it.

Then just to experiment, I decided to switch my white balance to the “shade” setting.  And this is what I got.

A pretty picture, but not an accurate representation of the color.  This looks a lot like Duck Egg blue, which the bed definitely is not.  Sometimes you can fix this using a photo editing software, but I was unable to get the true blue of this bed using Picmonkey, Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery.  I kept getting a lot of extra pink thrown in.

I’m not an expert on white balance, but I have been working on getting it right in my photos since that translates to showing more accurate pictures of colors on my blog.  I feel like it’s important since a lot of you (like me) will see a color you like on a piece of furniture, and then be so disappointed when the color looks entirely different in person.  I still don’t get it right all the time, as was the case with these bed photos, but I try!

Did you know that even a lot of camera phones have a white balance setting?  Mine does.  It doesn’t have as many as my Canon Rebel camera but it has cloudy, daylight, fluorescent and incandescent.  So, if you aren’t already working with your white balance settings, give it a try.

And if you want to see the real color on this bed, drop in at Reclaiming Beautiful in Stillwater where it is sporting one of my new tags!

That title sounds like some sort of rural floozy from Provence, although apparently the spelling should then be “chippie” (and if you don’t understand what I mean, look it up).  But in this case it’s this fabulous dresser.

I started with this dresser that I purchased via craigslist.

As usual, it looks great in the photo, but it had some flaws.  For one thing, the top was falling off.  Ken waved his magic wand and fixed her right up.  The finish was not in terrible condition, but there were some water rings on the top.  The main flaw, in my opinion, was that someone had put a rather shiny poly on it.  I am not a fan of shiny.

But shiny can work in your favor sometimes with milk paint.  In this case, I was able to get the absolutely perfect amount of crackling and chipping thanks to that previous finish.

So, what do you think of the green?  I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure at first.  This is the same Sweet Pickins’ In a Pickle that I used on the farmhouse table.  At first I thought it might be just a bit too bold for a dresser and that it might have an adverse effect on my ability to sell it.  I seriously considered putting white over it and letting just some of the green peek through.  But then I thought to hell with it!  I love it.  If no one else loves it, too bad.  If it doesn’t sell, I’ll just keep it myself!

This time I used my custom mixed dark wax (a mix of Johnson’s paste wax and dark brown Briwax) instead of the Miss Mustard Seed furniture wax.  That deepened the green a bit and helped bring out those fabulous crackles.

I used a new trick to get more chipping; tape.  After my paint had dried for about 24 hours, I pressed some blue painters tape along the edges of each drawer and then ripped it away pulling some of the paint with it.  It worked beautifully.  Maybe this piece would have chipped anyway once I vacuumed it, but it’s hard to say.  I recommend trying the tape thing yourself.

You can see that I switched out the knobs for glass.  I just felt like they brought out the vintage farmhouse look I was going for.

Why am I calling this a french farmhouse dresser?  Well, not because I know what kind of furniture they have in french farmhouses, but because I added a french stencil from Maison de Stencils to what I feel is a very farmhouse style piece.

Plus, I looked it up and the Pas-de-Calais region of France has 2,000,000 acres of farmland (Wikipedia said so).  So really, this stencil is very apropos for a french farmhouse dresser.

I’m a little disappointed that my stencil looks fuzzy in all of these photos.  It really isn’t fuzzy in person, but I continue to have problems with my photos looking fuzzy on WordPress.  You’ll just have to trust me when I say it isn’t this fuzzy.  Or, better yet, come and see it yourself at the grand opening event for Eye Candy ReFind in Hastings.

My vintage “Young Folks History of France” book was the perfect shade of green for staging this piece, along with my grandmother’s green depression glass canister.

So what do you think?  Are you in or are you out when it comes to green?

I spent a little time on Rachel Ashwell’s blog the other day.  She doesn’t really blog a whole lot, but every once in a while I check out what’s new.  Her latest post was about vintage furniture and here is what she had to say:

“When hunting for wooden pieces,  I am usually  looking for authentic paint in the Shabby palette (white, ivory, pale pink & blue, grey teal or bleached raw wood) or pieces that can create a rustic vintage decor and on a rare occasion I will repaint.  I get great joy when I see pieces come through our “restoration for reloving”  process.  Each piece is cleaned, shored up if wonky, drawers and shelves lined with vintage wallpaper, new glass, marble or hardware applied…and when ready we proudly tack on our branded brass plaque.”

Well, I am rarely lucky enough to find a piece that has an authentic vintage paint job in a color that I like so when I find one, much like Rachel, I like to preserve it.  Such was the case with the Nokomis dresser.

It was really pink, but not a terrible pink.  It also had some great layering under the pink.  Some blue and some cream.  I like to believe that Rachel would have snatched this one up had she come across it somewhere too.

Even though I wanted to save the original paint, I felt like I needed to tone down the pink-ness just a tad.  Adding some vintage wallpaper to the drawer fronts was just the ticket.  I chose a paper that had pink roses, but also has the blue and cream (ordered from Hannah’s Treasures via Etsy).

To me this is the quintessential farmhouse floral wallpaper.

Now, I’m going to give some details on wallpapering furniture here.  If you are never in a million years going to wallpaper anything, feel free to just skip right over this next part.

But, if you have been thinking about using vintage wallpaper on something yourself, here are a few tips.  First of all, I use Zinsser Sure Grip all purpose adhesive (I got mine at Home Depot).  I use the powder, because I can just mix up as much as I need, which isn’t much.  I usually cut my pieces just a bit bigger than they need to be.  For example, these drawer fronts were about 7.5″ high, so I cut 8.5″ strips.  I apply the adhesive to the back of the paper using an inexpensive chip brush.  Then I “book” the paper.  This is basically just gently folding half of the paper over to the other half, glued sides together.  Gently!  Don’t make a crease in the middle.  I was taught to do this back when I was wallpapering entire walls.  I don’t really know why.  Google says two things.  One, if your paper is going to stretch, this allows it to do so before you apply it.  Two, this allows the adhesive to “activate”.  I don’t know if either of these things are really true or not, I just do it anyway.  Next, since this pattern had a stripe, I tried to pick an obvious position on the paper to start at the left hand side of each drawer.  I could go into a bunch of detail here about ‘repeats’ and stuff like that, but that would really get boring.  For the most part, I didn’t pay too much attention to the repeat on this paper.  If you know what I’m talking about, go back and take a look a the pictures.  Yep, didn’t get the repeat perfectly, did I?  Did you care the first time you looked?  Probably not.  However, I did have to get the stripes lined up.  That would have been easier had I started with the bottom two drawers, and then lined up the upper right hand drawer last.  But, never let it be said I do things the easy way.  I had to rip the paper off that upper right drawer and re-do it when the stripes didn’t line up with the bottom.  I didn’t take that piece separating the upper drawers into account.  Ooops.  Luckily I had enough paper.

I actually had more than one person ask me if it was going to be difficult to trim the wallpaper around the keyhole escutcheons.  Sometimes it catches me off guard when I realize that not everyone knows how some of these things work.  Although they were fairly painted over, the escutcheons were just held in place by two small nails.  I used a razor blade to loosen the paint around them, then just carefully pried them off.  After I wallpapered the drawers, I put the escutcheons back on using the nails.  Easy peasy, no trimming around them required.

So far I have had very good luck with the Zinsser adhesive.  I find that the wallpaper goes on and stays on.  I wait 24 hours or so after applying it, and then I go back and sand the edges.  Yep, you read that right, I sand them.  It gives them a nice smooth edge, and leaves nothing loose to catch on stuff.

My little Artissimo blue chair makes a great companion to this dresser.  It cuts a little of the pink sweetness, and it brings out the blue in the wallpaper.

I like to think that Rachel would approve of this one, what do you think?

I had a conversation with some creative types the other day, and we were discussing the idea that there are really very few original ideas out there.  I am the very first to admit that none of the ideas I come up with are original.  Somewhere, whether in a magazine, on pinterest, or watching HGTV, I have seen something that planted the seed of the idea in my head.  Hopefully I add a splash of “quandification” (another word for you, Victoria!) to what I do, but I don’t claim sole ownership of any of my ideas.

That is in large part why I’m comfortable with sharing everything I do here for the world to see.  I didn’t invent any of it.  Someone else somewhere has already done it.  I try to always give credit where credit is due when I can point at something and say ‘that is what inspired me’, and such is the case with the dirty farmhouse table that I picked up the other day.  I had seen a photo of a gorgeous farmhouse table with a green base in the 2015 Best of Flea Market Style magazine.  It was just a little photo (p. 4 if you are looking for it), and I couldn’t find credits for it anywhere.  I still don’t know whose photo it is (if anyone knows, please tell me).  However, I was able to find the photo itself online, and here is it.

And here is my interpretation.

I knew I wanted milk paint for this makeover, and I knew I wanted a vibrant kelly green.  Neither of Miss Mustard’s greens were going to cut it.  So, I ordered “In a Pickle” green from Sweet Pickins online and patiently (not) waited for it to arrive.  Fortunately, it was shipped to me lickety split so I didn’t have to wait long.

This is such a rich, vibrant green.  You’ll remember that the table base was already painted a grey blue color, so spots of that color do peek through on the edges.  I think it works.  The Sweet Pickins milk paint mixed up very nicely.  You can see that I didn’t really get any chipping with it, which kind of surprised me since I was painting over existing paint.  I did sand first.  This was the second time I used the Sweet Pickins paint.  I also have used her Sweetie Jane, which is the perfect shade of aqua/blue-green.  I finished the table with Miss Mustard’s furniture wax.

Here is a reminder of where this table started out.  Remember how dreadfully stained and dirty the top was?

Gross!  After I literally hosed it down in the yard and then scrubbed it from top to bottom, Ken came over with his belt sander and we tried to knock back the worst of the stains.  I think we were pretty successful.

I added some Dark Walnut gel stain and called it good.  It’s not perfect.  I wanted it to look beat up and rustic, but in a good way.

I filled my French Market wooden tote with Annabelle hydrangeas arranged in my now clean and sparkling Ball jars.

I’ve actually got this flower arrangement on my own dining room table at the moment, but I knew it would be perfect for staging this table.

This is one of those versatile pieces that could be used in several different ways.  It would make a fantastic desk.  It’s larger than the table I’m currently using as a desk, too large for my space or I’d be tempted to keep it.  It would be a great size for crafting.

This would also be an amazing piece for a covered porch.  I can picture a candlelit dinner for two, listening to the crickets chirp, a glass of wine.

Or, another great idea, add some large casters to the legs and use this as a move-able kitchen island.

So many possibilities for this table.  What would you do with it?

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m drawn to farmhouse style.  Maybe it’s because I live in what was originally a farmhouse.  Or maybe it’s because I always enjoyed visiting the South Dakota relatives who still live on the family farm where my grandmother was born.  This photo of one of my grandmother’s sisters and her farmer husband was taken there.

Most probably, it’s just because it’s really popular right now and I tend to fall for trendy stuff.

Whatever the reason, when Mr. Q brought home this little washstand, I got a vintage farmhouse vibe from it.

This came from the same couple who sold me the primitive cupboards.  When Mr. Q went back to pick up the 2nd cupboard, he was offered this piece plus a galvanized metal pie safe.  He figured it was a safe bet that I would want both of them, so he brought them home.  And he was right!

After stripping the top, I originally put two coats of Miss Mustard Seed’s milk paint in Mora on the rest of the cupboard.  If you’ve used the Mora, you know that although it is a very pale grey, it has an almost minty green undertone.  That green tone just wasn’t working with the dark wood top.  If a color isn’t working for me, I’ll cut my losses and start over rather than try to be happy with results I don’t like.  So, out came the Marzipan.  Turned out that the warm almond color was perfect on this piece.  By the way, the finish on this was so dry that I didn’t get any chipping at all with the milk paint.

You may also have noticed that I changed out the hardware.  I was not a fan of the drawer pulls that came with this.  I filled in the extra holes on the drawer and used some distressed glass knobs instead.

I left the rustic inside alone, and as you can see I staged it with just some of my many, no longer dirty, vintage blue Ball jars.

This little cupboard was missing its original casters when I got it, but I could see that it must have had some at one time.  Luckily I have a stash of old casters so I was able to replace them.  I like how they lift the piece up off the floor (or in this case, the ground) a little.

The top of this piece was in slightly poor condition.  One section had split off from the rest.  I asked Ken to repair it for structural integrity, but leave it kind of rough looking.  I also stripped the remaining finish, but I didn’t try to sand out all of the imperfections.  I liked the rustic nature of it.  Once it was stripped, I added a new stencil that I just got from Maison de Stencils.  I used black acrylic craft paint.  Once it was dry, I sanded over it to give it an aged appearance.  Then I just waxed the top with Cece Caldwell’s Aging Cream.

This little cupboard sold very quickly at Reclaiming Beautiful in Stillwater, so clearly I am not the only fan of farmhouse style out there!