For those of you in the U.S., I hope you are enjoying the long Memorial Day weekend.  I don’t exactly know what happened here in Minnesota.  It feels like we went right from winter to summer without stopping at spring in between.  Our temperature is supposed to hit 97 today, while a mere six weeks ago we had blizzard conditions.  Seriously, what is up with that?

So, I’m curious, how many of you have come across this photo on pinterest?

Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe I’m the only one who is utterly obsessed with that gorgeous color and that amazing authentic looking chippy patina.

I pinned that photo way back in the day when pinterest was new and you had to be invited to join, does anyone else remember that?

It took a bit of digging to find the origin of the photo.  I started by following it back to whomever pinned it, but that just led back to someone’s tumblr account.  Next I checked out the watermark, aprilpizana.com and found the photographer who took the photo.  I kept digging and finally found the answer.  April Pizana was hired to take photos at Rachel Ashwell’s b&b in Texas and that’s where this photo was taken.

So it’s a Rachel Ashwell piece.  Of course it is.  It has Rachel written all over it, doesn’t it?  The color, the gorgeous floral wallpaper, the fresh flowers.  The whole shabby chic-ness of it all.

But sadly, my research did not lead where I hoped it would.  To a blog where someone listed precisely what brand and color of paint is on that dresser.  In fact, I suspect it’s an original 60+ year old paint job.  So I gave up on finding this precise color.

But then I saw the Sweet Pickins color called Patina.

It’s pretty close to the same color, right?  A bit brighter, and with a bit more blue perhaps.  So I ordered some to use on an antique Eastlake style dresser that I’ve been hanging onto for a while.  However, once the paint arrived I simply could not wait to paint something in it, and the Eastlake still needs some repair work, so I pulled out this dresser instead.

This one also needed a few repairs, but my handyman/neighbor Ken had already done them.  The main problem with this dresser was the broken top.

Ken did a great job re-attaching that broken piece using dowel pins and glue and it’s firmly in place now, but the crack is still pretty obvious even though I filled it with Dixie Belle mud before I painted.  The entire top of the dresser is warped and Ken struggled with getting it to lay flat again.

Ironically the crack is not very visible in any of the photos I took, but trust me, it is much more noticeable in person.

But I’m hoping that someone else out there will appreciate this piece despite its flaws, even embrace them because they add character to the piece.

I ended up having to put three coats of the Patina on this dresser to get good coverage, but it did start out pretty dark.

I really expected it to have better coverage than that, but I could still see streaks of the original dark color after two coats.  So three coats it was.

I sanded to distress and then used Miss Mustard Seed clear wax as the topcoat.

When I purchased this dresser I thought those knobs on it were just simple wooden knobs that I could paint.  But when I went to remove them I realized they were metal.  Very plain, boring, solid metal knobs.  Obviously not original to the dresser.  In fact, if you go back to the ‘before’ photo and study them, the scale is just a bit too small.  Luckily I have a rather large stash of wooden knobs that I’ve taken off other pieces and I happened to have 10 of them that were a better fit for this dresser.

I painted them up and I love how they look!

I didn’t do anything fancy with this piece.  I felt like it had a simple vintage farmhouse vibe and I wanted to retain that feel.  The color itself has enough impact, wouldn’t you say?

The next time I use this color I might try to mix in just a bit of a more pale, minty color to get just a little bit closer to my Rachel Ashwell inspiration piece.  We’ll see how it goes.

But for now I have to say I am loving the Patina on this dresser!