Category: just stuff.

Remember my experiment with the Martha Stewart Erasable Liquid chalk?

Yeah, not pretty.

And a while after I posted it, I got a comment from Brenda who said she had tried the product too, and when she tried to ‘erase’ it, she couldn’t get it off.  Yikes!  At the time, mine had been painted for about a month and I had not yet tried to erase it.  So I grabbed a damp paper towel and gave it a go.  She was right, it wouldn’t budge!  Then I remembered that I had read somewhere that using a magic eraser would do the trick.  Sure enough, it did.  So, if you have tried this product and want to remove it down the road, remember your magic eraser!

Since my Family and Friends stencil fit this chalkboard so perfectly, I still wanted to use it.  But this time I reverted to my tried and true Gioconda chalk pencil.

Mr. Q ordered mine from Amazon, but I think you can find these (or similar) at Michaels these days.

It took a little bit longer to fill in the entire stencil with the pencil, but it was worth it.

I used three different techniques for this.  The big letters at the top were outlined first with the pencil, then I added diagonal hash marks to fill them in.

With the next two lines of smaller print, I just used the sharp point of the pencil to fill in as best I could.  I went back after the stencil was removed and added some of the smaller lines that didn’t come through.

For the crown, I used the pencil to outline it, then shaded it in.

And for the branches at the bottom, I outlined them but did not shade them in.

And voila.  Much, much better, don’t you think?

Now that the weather is nice enough for working in my Carriage House workshop, and with my sale coming up in June, I’m really cranking out the projects.  So you may notice that I am posting more than usual.  I hope you don’t mind when I share so these with you.  I like to think there is some value in these posts aside from just a pitch for items that will be at my sale.  And for those of you that are local, I hope I’m enticing you to show up on June 11!

Happy administrative professional’s day!

Today is the day to appreciate the professionals who help make your job easier.  At the day job I have four of them, and each one is fantastic!  They know their jobs inside and out and make it look easy.

Since I work for the government, there is no budget for ‘appreciation’, so I am on my own when it comes to showing some for my staff (at least at my level).  Each year I try to come up with something that I can put together for them without breaking the bank.  I keep an eye out year round for supplies and then I tuck them away for the day.  Last summer I found a set of vintage enamelware cups and saucers at a garage sale, so I snatched them up because I knew they would be perfect for floral arrangements.

I picked up some floral foam (the wet foam, meant for fresh flowers) and some chalkboard picks at Hobby Lobby, and then ran to Bachman’s for some fresh flowers.

If you’ve never used floral foam, it’s pretty easy.  To shape mine, I just pressed the cups into the foam to get an outline and then cut it with a sharp knife.

I just kept trimming the foam until it fit neatly inside the cup.

Then I saturated the foam with water and started adding flowers.  I started at the center with slightly taller stems, and then just kept filling in towards the edges.

I used white roses, baby’s breath, Viburnum, hydrangea and some mums.

I added each person’s name to a chalk board stick using a chalk marker.

And stuck them in the foam.

Wouldn’t these make great centerpieces as well?

I hope they like them!

Many moons ago I came across an Eastlake style dresser that came with its two hankie drawers, but they were not attached.

 I opted to leave them off and I painted the dresser in Artissimo and called it the Patriot, maybe you remember it?

You could still see shadows where the hankie drawers once sat on the top.

I felt like the dresser was more versatile without the hankie drawers.  But, I hung onto them thinking they would be fun to paint up and used on their own.  I planned for them to be a winter project, easy to accomplish in the house.  Then they sat.  All winter.  Just never got around to them until last week.

One evening after work I needed something creative to work on, so I pulled them out and got started.  I stripped the tops, then sanded them a little and added some German stencils in black.  I sanded the stencil to give it a more weathered look and then waxed the entire top with the Cece Caldwell Aging Cream.

I used up the very last drop of my tropical kitchen island milk paint using it as a base coat on the rest of the drawers.  Then I added two coats of MMS Linen on top of that.  I wanted to get some chipping to show the undercoat, so I waxed in a few strategic locations around the edges first.

I wasn’t fond of the little porcelain white knobs that came on the drawers, so I swapped them our for some old knobs in my stash.

I lined the drawers with some pretty map paper and called them done.

I think these could be used in lots of different ways.  For example you could use them on a farmhouse table desk to hold your pencils and post its.

Or you could use them on the kitchen counter for extra untensils, or next to your Keurig filled with K-cups.

Judging by how creative your ideas were for the chippy wall shelf I painted last week, I think you could come up with any number of creative ways to put these orphaned drawers to use!

These will likely make their way into the Carriage House sale.  Speaking of which, June will be here before we know it and I am starting to gear up for my occasional sale which will be held on Thursday, June 11 from 5 pm to 7 pm and Friday, June 12 from 9 am to 2 pm.  Pencil it in!

I just realized that I’m not sure were I purchased this little wall shelf!

Most likely a garage sale because this is the sort of thing that is kind of putzy to makeover, so I must have gotten a really great deal on it.  And then it sat in the ‘to-do’ pile for a long time because I didn’t want to deal with it.

But I had some leftover paint from the tropical kitchen island last weekend, so I decided to slap it on this.

And voila!

It got really nicely chippy.

One of the tiny knobs was missing.  I tried multiple different replacement knobs, most of which were too big for the scale of this piece.  But I pulled these two out of my stash and thought they worked quite nicely.

I lined the drawers with some pretty scrapbook paper.

And then I filled it up with some of my favorite ironstone.

I’m hanging this on the wall, but you could also set this on a dresser or some other surface because it has a flat bottom suitable for that.  These shelves are perfect for displaying a collection, but I wonder if people find them to be too ‘old school’.

What do you think?  Lame old fashioned, or yummy vintage?  What would you display?

I believe I’ve mentioned it before, but my family moved around a little when I was young.   I was born in Chicago, as was my sister Debbie (right).

We later moved to Minnesota, and then to Florida.   Both Debbie and I attended high school in Florida, and my sister, who is 2 1/2 years older than me, got married there.  I believe I was 17 at the time, and she was 20 (yep, a young bride).  Or maybe I am off by a year, but don’t worry, if I am I know she will be sure to correct me in a comment.  She likes to correct me.

Anyway, the year was 1981 and my sister married a guy from New Jersey.

Can you tell that her favorite color has always been blue?

Within a year of her marriage, my sister’s husband asked her to move back to New Jersey with him to be closer to his family.  What is a young bride (with a brand new baby, by the way) to do?

Fast forward about 33 years and my sis and I have lived in different parts of the country ever since.

We’ve gotten creative about staying close in spirit, even though we were far apart in body.  We both got bluetooths for our phones and we would walk ‘together’ every Sunday.  She’d walk in her local park, I’d walk in mine and we’d chat.  I’m sure a bunch of my neighbors now think of me as the crazy lady that talks to herself in the park.

But, better yet, we regularly met up for some pretty awesome trips, including our river cruise down the Danube last fall.

Here we are in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1998, another off season European vacation that our mom talked us into.  I still remember how cold it was that day.

We’ve taken quit a few cruises together too.  Here we are on a Baja Mexico cruise that we took for our mom’s 70th birthday.

You can see that Mr. Q joined us, as did my niece Kris.

Honestly, I always figured it was a pipe dream to imagine that my sister and I would ever live near other.  After her eventual divorce, my sister stayed in New Jersey because she had young children.  As her children got older, she talked about potentially moving to Las Vegas to be near our parents.  After my dad died, she got even a little more serious about moving to Las Vegas.  But the economy in Vegas really suffered after the recession.  She wanted to transfer within her company, but there were never any openings out there.

I have always had a campaign going to get her to move to Minnesota.  At first glance, you might think Minnesota doesn’t have much going for it.  It’s really cold and snowy in the winter.  And we have a lot of mosquitoes.  We are really far from an ocean too (a downside in my mind).  However, Minnesota is known for its high quality of life.  Really, it is.  I swear.  As long as you have some decent long underwear and some snow boots.  And I am happy to announce that my long standing campaign has finally come to fruition!  Not only is my sister moving to Minnesota, but my neice is joining her!

While they were here visiting in early March they went apartment hunting and found an awesome place that is only about 10 minutes away from me.  Both of them handed out resumes at various places as well.  As a result, my sister was just offered a lateral transfer to a job here.  She starts on May 4!  She’ll actually be moving in with me for a bit until her apartment is ready, and I plan to put her to work painting furniture.  My niece will join her on July 1.

So yes, it is truly official!  I still can barely believe it myself.  I knew they were serious about moving, but I also knew that my sister needed to have the right job lined up to really make it work.  Now she does!  And I am over the moon with excitement.  Plus, not only am I getting my sister, but I’m also getting my neice Kris.  Life is good!

Judging by the comments, it looks like a lot of you could use a good book!  Unfortunately I only have one to share.  So without any further ado, the winner of the drawing for Ordinary Grace is …. Ruthie Henderson!

But I didn’t want to just mail one lonely little book!  So in addition to the book, Ruthie will also be receiving some magazines …

 The Upcycled Style has a great article in it about Danielle Driscoll of Finding Silver Pennies.  If you follow Miss Mustard Seed’s blog, and especially her Furniture Friday link parties, you’ve probably seen Danielle’s work.  She has a great blog, and is a super lovely person to boot.  She was kind enough to answer some questions for me when I was new to using milk paint.

I’m also including some Fusion paint samples and a paint brush.

Plus, a set of Paris in Color notecards.

Mr. Q drew the lucky winner’s name out of our trusty metal colander.  Ironically, the winner is one of my students from my painting class.  She painted the minty green stool.

That also means she is local.  I know, right?  What are the chances?  When Mr. Q drew the name I told him that he had to vouch for me, it really was drawn fair and square.

Congrats to Ruthie!  I hope she enjoys the book as much as I did.

Aside from clearing out the front porch and working on a couple of small projects last weekend, I really didn’t get much accomplished.  Which means, I don’t have a fabulous furniture transformation to share with you today.  I seem to have fallen into a groove with my blog, and I generally post something on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  As a result, not having a post at all on a Wednesday just feels, well, wrong somehow.  The truth of the matter is that I spent a good deal of last weekend just chillin’.  Every once in a while, I need some downtime to just be lazy.  This often includes staying in bed on a rainy Sunday morning with coffee and a good book.  So today, you’re getting a book recommendation!

I know, weird right?  And no, this isn’t an April fools joke!

So, if you aren’t a reader, feel free to ignore this post as a blip on the radar and come back on Friday when I plan to post about a quick chair makeover.

But if, like me, you are always in the market for a good read, then keeping reading …

First a little background.  I LOVE to read.  I watched an interview (on Ellen) with Jim Parsons (plays Sheldon on Big Bang Theory) the other day, and he admitted that he factors in reading time every night before bed.  Well, he and I have this in common.  I read every night for at least a little bit.  I look forward to weekends when I can read late into the night and not have to worry about getting up the next morning.

The main thing that I look for in a book is the author’s ability to immerse me in their story, whatever it might be.  I crave books that are so good I can’t put them down.  The kind where I keep reading until the book falls forward and hits me in the nose because I’m dozing off despite myself.  For some reason, I have found such books hard to come by lately.  I’ve started lots of books, only to give up on them because I just don’t care what happens next.

However, recently I was in the Valley Bookseller in Stillwater (Mr. Q was promoting the latest Chicken Soup book that he has a story in) and the gal there recommended a book by William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace.

Krueger is a local writer from the Twin Cities.  He might be better known for his Cork O’Connor mystery series, but this particular book is not part of that series.

Here is how his website describes Ordinary Grace:

“New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.”

I’ll admit, this description didn’t immediately grab me.  Young boy, coming of age, yada, yada.  Whatever.  But, the book won a bunch of awards, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

Once I started reading, what really hooked me was how I could practically hear the crickets chirping on a balmy summer evening and smell the river flowing past its weedy banks.  I could feel the sun on my head on a hot July day and taste that ice cold root beer after a Saturday of yard work.  I remember that feeling of lying in bed on a hot summer night before air conditioning was something that everyone had.  The book transported me to a hot Minnesota summer and a time when things seemed just a little bit simpler (even if they really weren’t).

I enjoyed the book so much, that I was inspired to tell you all about it.  Then, I thought, gee, I’m done with the book, why not offer it up as a giveaway?

If you would like to have my copy of the book, please leave me a comment by Friday, April 3 at midnight.  I’ll draw a name from the comments and mail the book off to that person.

So,  good luck if you are hoping to win, and even if you don’t, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Ordinary Grace.

And if you’re really just looking for an awesome chippy chair makeover, come back on Friday!

I’ve been working on some small painting projects lately as a part of spring cleaning.  I had various piles of thrift store and other finds and I needed to get them painted and out of the Q Branch.

After finishing some more hatboxes as well as a set of wooden shoe trees, it occurred to me that these projects would make a great comparison study for Fusion paint v. Miss Mustard Seed milk paint.

Can you guess which is painted in MMS milk paint and which in Fusion?  It’s kind of a no brainer due to the chippy factor.  Yep, the shoe trees are painted in MMS Grain Sack, and the hatbox is Fusion’s Champlain.

Let’s start with the shoe trees.  My friend Cathy passed these on to me.

Even though they are really just beat up shoe trees, not fabulous vintage shoemaker forms, I knew I could make them fab with the addition of some paint and some rub-ons.  I also thought ‘the chippier, the better’, and these had the sort of semi-shiny wood finish that would be conducive to chipping.  I used a mere tablespoon of milk paint powder to one tablespoon of water for these and did have some paint left over.  Once they were dry, I sanded them and added clear wax.  Then I added a variety of 7 Gypsies rub-ons to them.

I added some picture hangers to the back of each so so they can be hung on the wall as decor, or as a place to hang your necklaces or maybe your bathrobe.

In between painting the shoes trees, I also worked on some more hatboxes.  I wanted to try doing some with the Fusion paint.  I painted my first hat box with chalk paint and that ended up being a little dicey when it came time to wet down the transfer.  I had to be really careful to not remove too much paint along with the paper backing of the transfer.  But here is what Fusion’s manufacturer says about their paint:

“FUSION is made up of 100% acrylic resin and is unlike any other product on the market. This results in one consistent and cohesive surface across your piece. So what exactly does that mean?

It is a water proof, non-porous surface which is why you do not need a top coat for water-permanency! Using 100% acrylic binder results in the strongest adhesion and durability once cured.”

The ‘water-permanency’ part was key for me.

I started with a coat of Bedford on my hat box so that when I distressed the edges the grey would show through.  Then I ran a block of canning wax around the edges to make them easier to distress later.  Next came two coats of Fusion’s Champlain.  I let that dry overnight.  The next day I added my transfer design using the same process I used on my previous hat box, letting it then dry overnight.  Turns out I was right, it was easier to wet the paper without taking off any paint.

Once I had removed the paper to reveal the transfer, I used some 220 grit sandpaper to rough up the entire box.

Easy peasy.  This hatbox was so much fun that I did another one.

and then another small one …

To recap, let’s compare the results.  When it comes to the chippy factor, milk paint wins hands down.  But, that really only works on certain surfaces.  Mainly wood or other more porous materials.  If you need a paint that will stick to non-porous materials, or become more waterproof for things like these gel medium transfers, then Fusion is a better choice.  If you want an authentic looking distressed finish, you can’t beat milk paint but the results can be unpredictable.  You can distress the Fusion paint, but I find it more difficult than with other products.  If you want to paint straight out of the can and not mess with mixing and measuring, Fusion is for you.  But I haven’t forgotten my old friend chalk paint.  For painting straight out of the can, and the ease of distressing, it is still an excellent choice.  Just remember you’ll still need to add that top coat of wax or some other sealant.

I’m pretty sure I will continue to paint most of my vintage cottage style furniture pieces in milk paint.  But I will definitely go with Fusion for mid-century modern pieces, metal, glass and pieces that I want to add gel medium transfers to.  Both are great products and as you can see with my shoe trees and hatboxes, if you work with them you can get an awesome vintage look out of either one!

Happy St. Pat’s!  Are you wearing the green?  I haven’t got an Irish bone in my body, but I do love green stuff.

My friend Meggan and I were thrifting again a couple of weeks ago, and for some reason I was finding lots of it.  I came home with this little pile of goodies.

I passed on a lovely mid-century decanter set in green glass with gold details.  I should have grabbed it, but didn’t.  Shoulda, coulda, woulda, right?

I had an idea that the green metal box would make a fantastically junkalicious medicine cabinet, so I decided to try the gel medium transfer method on it.  I found an awesome french graphic on Graphics Fairy, and followed the same method I used last time on the hat box.  I was so excited, and sure that this was going to be amazing.

Um, hmmmm, not so much.

What went wrong?  I’m really not sure, but the gel medium didn’t stick to the metal.  Picture putting some Elmer’s glue on something, and then being able to sort of peel it right off once dry.  That’s what happened here.  It peeled.  And the more I tried to salvage it, the worse it got.  Eventually I realized that the entire design was just going to peel off.  Did I apply the gel medium too thickly?  Should I have prepped the surface better prior to application?  Or was my idea doomed from the start because the gel medium just won’t work on painted metal?  Or perhaps it would have all been OK if I had added a coat of mod podge on top.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers for you.  Just a warning that sometimes the gel medium transfer is not all it’s cracked up to be.

In the end, I was able to remove the whole thing quite easily by scraping it off with a razor blade.  Then I started over with a stencil and some paint.  A much better choice for this piece.

I don’t love this design as much as the first one from Graphics Fairy, but it still adds a cool vibe to the box.  I had Ken put some holes in the back so I could hang it on the wall as a cabinet.

Meggan spotted the glass that is tucked inside the cabinet for me, isn’t it fab?  It came home from the thrift store the same day.

In addition to the fab green cabinet and the little french glass, I also purchased the green frame that is in the back of my first photo.  I just loved the patina on the frame, and the green color.  I knew it would be perfect for some Paris in Color postcards in green.  Are you guys familiar with Paris in Color?  It’s a book of photography by Nichole Robertson.  Check her out if you haven’t seen her work.

The postcards fit perfectly in the existing mat, and they are so much better than the 80’s tulip prints that were there originally.

I hope you enjoyed this little touch of green, now go out and drink some green beer and beware of bad leprechauns!