If you’ve been following me for long, you know that my ‘workshop’ is out in the carriage house …

And it’s not heated.  Plus we have to fit our cars in there in the winter.

So I haul all of my supplies inside the house before we get a freeze, and then I do most of my painting in the piano room.

I put a drop cloth over the piano and it becomes a workbench, and I keep the supplies I use most often in the Specimens cupboard.

It’s definitely not glamorous.  And whenever we’re having guests I have to put everything away.

It’s also not very much space to work in.

So as fall approaches each year I start to pile up a bunch of small projects to work on after the Christmas season is over and I’m steadily working my way through that pile.

Today’s small project is a simple wooden tray that I picked up at a garage sale last summer.

It definitely seems to be homemade.  You can see that the wood piece that makes up the bottom originally had hinges on it, and the one shorter side is a bit thinner than the others.  Someone clearly cobbled it together out of bits and pieces they had on hand, you gotta love that.

After first painting the tray in Dixie Belle’s Dried Sage and deciding I didn’t like it (even though I’ve used Dried Sage on numerous projects that I loved), I ended up going with a very simple makeover.  I added two coats of DB’s Drop Cloth.  Once dry, I added some bits and pieces of French typography from my transfer scrap pile.

I used google translate to make sure I wasn’t putting nonsense on my tray.  That first line, Tous droits réservé, is simple, it means ‘all rights reserved.’  Évreux is a place in France.  And that bottom line is just a name, followed by the word ‘printer’.  So, in other words, it could be considered an advertisement for a printer.

After the wording was in place, I added a small embellishment to the bottom of the tray too.

I’d considered going with something a bit more elaborate, but I figured most people would be putting stuff inside the tray and thus potentially covering that up anyway.

I sanded the edges of the tray to distress them, and then finished everything off with a coat of clear wax.

I added some old books, a pair of crusty old paint brushes in a ball jar, and an antique camera for styling.

How would you style this tray?

Leave a comment and let me know!