Hey everybody!  I’m back from visiting my mom, but haven’t had a spare moment yet to sit down and respond to comments.  I’m going to get to that this morning, but in the meantime, here’s a quick project to enjoy with your morning coffee.

You may remember that I picked up this wooden tote while thrifting a few weeks ago.

It pretty much looked freshly constructed out of new wood.  The one downside was that it was made out of fairly rough sawn wood.

So a week or two ago when I was looking for a quick project to fill some spare time, I pulled this out of the pile to see if I could age it up a bit.

I started by sanding down that rough wood a bit.  I didn’t get it totally smooth, but now you can handle it without getting a splinter.  Next I gave it a base coat of Dixie Belle’s French Linen.  Once that first coat was dry, I added a little bit of Dixie Belle’s Sea Spray (a texture additive for paint) into the French Linen and stippled it on randomly.  Adding some texture to the paint helped further disguise that rough sawn wood.

I think the key to aging a piece is to have several layers of different colored paint, so I then added some of DB’s Bunker Hill Blue here and there.  Once that dried, I painted the entire outside of the tote in DB’s Drop Cloth.

Next up came sanding with 120 grit paper to both smooth out the Sea Spray a bit, and to reveal some of those layers of colors.

I’d recently used one of the Lovely Labels Middy transfers from re.design with prima on a bucket, so I knew there were a couple of segments in that transfer set that would work perfectly on this tote.

I put the ‘Paris 1878’ section on one side, and the ‘blessed’ section on the other side.

Once I had them both applied, I top-coated everything with some of Dixie Belle’s Easy Peasy spray wax.

And yes, that is snow on the window behind the tote, but I took these pics after our April Fool’s Day snow storm.  I returned home from my mom’s to see that all of our snow has melted.  It’s always kind of amazing how fast those big snow banks will melt away in the spring.

I hope you enjoyed this quickie tote makeover.  Leave me a comment and let me know!