q is for quandie

You’ve all seen them.  Old sewing machine tables.  They once had a sewing machine tucked inside and you could flip open the top and pop up the machine.  I bet these things were considered the height of innovation and so very convenient when they first came out.  No more having to drag the heavy sewing machine out of the closet and set it up on the kitchen table.

 And now of course they are obsolete, and the carcasses are a dime a dozen.  Somehow I managed to accumulate two of them and both were free.  And missing their machines.

Unfortunately I neglected to take ‘before’ photos of this piece, and I also didn’t get ‘fail’ photos of this one.  What do I mean?  Well, the first time I painted this I did an undercoat of  MMS Flow Blue with a top coat of Linen.  Problem was, it was a bleeder.  And you couldn’t see it with the Flow Blue.  It wasn’t until I added the Linen (which is a warm white) that I saw the pink stain coming through.  Since I didn’t really love this piece in the Linen anyway, I decided to just go back to the drawing board and paint it a darker color.

First I slapped on a quick coat of MMS Tough Coat Sealer, just to be sure that bleeding stain wouldn’t continue to plague me.  Then I painted it with Urban Rooster’s Smokey Ash.  Of course, the distressing brought out the Linen color underneath.

I’m not usually a fan of seeing a white base coat under something, but I was kind of stuck with it on this table so I made the best of it by adding a white stencil to the top.

I painted the little flip down compartment (where you kept your bobbins and needles) in Urban Rooster’s Cotton Candy.

I tried six ways from Sunday to get good photos of this table, but it just wasn’t cooperating.  First I staged it in the photo cottage …

I didn’t love these photos though.  I couldn’t get the angle quite right.

I tried adding the suggestion of some French flair with this book on the chair.

But it wasn’t helping.  This is a great book, by the way. Lots of fantastic pictures of French interiors.

I then moved the table to the front porch and placed my French cane back chair next to it.  I’m really not any happier with these photos, but I had to call it good because I took this table over to Eye Candy REfind for the grand opening last weekend.

I don’t think a chair has enough bulk to balance the table, but next to a bed or sofa it would be perfect.  Since the inside is basically hollow with just that little hinged bobbin drawer, it doesn’t provide much storage.  But you can add your own with some vintage suitcases stacked underneath.

I had Ken permanently attach the hinged top on this table, but I am thinking about creating a drinks station with the second one.  You’ve probably seen them on pinterest, where you flip open the top and there is space for an ice bucket where the sewing machine once was.  But that project is for another day!

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?