Color Therapy, Part 2

For the "before" photos, go to Color Therapy, Part 1. 

Before I proceed with continuing my storybook style recap of the crazy amount of painting that went on around here a few weeks ago, I have a few official items of business to care for from the previous post.

To my dear Sweetheart:

I do apologize for taking a picture of the yard before the dandelions were killed. Rest assured, my readers, the dandelions are all dead. For now.

I also apologize for taking a picture of the back of Rovey with the bolt caps off. I also, since I'm being all apologetic and everything, apologize for not noticing that the tire store didn't put the bolt caps back on--I was distracted by the enormous screw/drill bit that I've been looking for, and apparently we drove around on since last July. 

I DO NOT however, apologize for using the words "cereal bowl" and "underwear" in the same sentence. Mostly because I find it highly amusing that this even disturbed you. Please notice that I have also managed to work the words "cereal bowl" and "underwear" into not one, but two sentences in this blog post.

Thank you, I am done with the official business now.

  

Seriously, this was a ton of painting, that all total--since I was taking breathing breaks especially, haha, took me about three days. If I had it to do over again, this lamp is probably the only thing I would have primed--I didn't realize I even had primer when I started painting it though--I found it a bit later in the game. I was planning on antiquing it with sandpaper after the fact however, so it ended up just fine. I just sanded the bubbly areas down a bit.

Adding the clothespins to a bowl after they're all dried... this is not quite all of them. I used Krylon and Rustoleum spray paint, and the nozzle on the Rustoleum was way better, but the Krylon dried way faster. So you gotta pick your poison, apparently.

The rain started about halfway into my second day, so I had to move it all into the garage... which is beyond dark, and not horrifyingly disorganized, but definitely worse than I would like--I need more shelving, and the inside of the house has to come first. You should have seen the look of horror on my children's faces as I started hauling ALL our lamps out there so I could see what I was doing. "MOM! You can't spray paint all our lamps!!" Haha. I told them I could, and they better watch out, because I might spray paint them too.  Of course, I did not spray paint any of those lamps, or my children.

This is the table after it's coat of stain. Minwax Brand, Jacobean Color, which is my very favorite stain. The legs were pretty beat up, but somehow, strangely enough the top was pristine. It looked weird. I'm not a fan of perfect furniture. Furniture in our house gets drinks set on it, and feet, and whatever else, and that is how we like it. We are in charge--not the furniture. Also, I have the bad habit of not looking where I set my drinks while I'm reading, and spilling my drinks everywhere when I set them halfway on and halfway off the coaster. So, I set about beating the top of this table up with various metal tools I found around the garage and using my patented swing hammer, spin it in the air, let it land however and wherever it wants maneuver. The top matched the legs by the time I was done. :-) One good thick coat of Polyurethane, and the night to cure, and this table was ready to go...

Cleaning the "Command Center" area out... So excited at this point!

Originally when I bought the three Goodwill Lamps, I had intended on just buying regular shades at Walmart and calling it good. But, when I went to Walmart to price them out I realized that at more than $15 a piece, by the the time it was all said and done I'd have been spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 for the shades. Which, realistically isn't that much money, but I have some other things that I want that I would much rather spend that $50 on. So, I decided to go back to Goodwill and see if I could find lampshades that would fit the bill, and come in cheaper. It took two trips, but all together I paid for these three lampshades what I would have paid for ONE at Walmart. Not too shabby. Obviously the colors are all wrong, but with some base coats of spray paint, and then brush coats on two of them, they ended up being a bit of work, but definitely more original and they will work for as long as we need them to.

Drumroll Please!! This is my official "After" photo of my Command Center, right off my kitchen.

All total, including the cost of spray paint and things like a whole tablet of scrap booking paper I had to buy for the girls cameos that I only used about three sheets of, this project came in under $45!! Awesome!

The fabric that I used I didn't count in the cost--because I bought it quite a while ago. I've had it in my stash because I'm collecting fabric to make quilts for my girls. I only used about a 1/2 yard for this. It is Sis Boom Queen Street by Jennifer Paganelli (Maeve in Periwinkle). I assembled the bulletin boards by mounting styrafoam pieces from the packing for the command center desk onto the wood that I knocked from the table I refinished. Then I wrapped the Styrofoam in fabric with Mod-Podge, and mounted the cork board on top.

I LOVE these cameos. They were way harder than I expected them to be--but now that I've done them once, I think they'll be pretty easy to repeat. I have an ultrasound pic in the third frame, and that will obviously be traded out for a cameo once Bebe' is big enough.

The basic process for doing cameos is all over the web, so I won't repeat it here other than to say: take a profile pic, trace the face, freehand what you want their hair to look like if necessary, and then cut it out, trace it onto paper and cut that out, then mount over other pretty paper. There ya go. My tips for doing your own cameos would be:

1) Make sure your photo is a PERFECT 90 degree angle of the face, with closed mouth. If your kid is old enough, show them what you're trying to do so they understand what you're looking for. Telling Brie what I was doing made a magnificent difference in her cooperation anyway. :-)

2) If you're using a 5x7 frame, then print out a 4x6 of the photo. If you're using a 8x10 frame, print out a 5x7. Basically, just go one size smaller than whatever you want your finished product to be. It will look nicer.

The frames were ones that I had around that I just gave a few coats of blue to match the fabric and offset the red in the cameos a bit.

The lamp! I had some "help" with the sanding, so it got a little more antiqued than I probably would have done it in a few places. I'm ok with that though. :-) The shade took to the spray paint quite nicely, but I wanted it to have a brushed look, so I brushed over the top with a few different shades of yellow/tan. The original bottom trim was in rough shape, and the shade wasn't quite long enough for the lamp, so I added a ruffle and bias tape trim from some bias tape I had sitting around to solve both those problems.

This jar was originally a Pirouline tin. My girls use Crayola's Super Tips markers for EVERYTHING, and so I always keep a few extra packages around here as backup, because it feels like they'll all be working just fine, and then one day they're all mashed and unusable any more. I haven't been able to figure out where to keep the backups so they're out of sight but available, and this container solved that problem perfectly. Plus I needed to break up the red just a bit. I'd found the primer by the time I got to this, so I just primed it, yellowed it, and then mod-podged fabric over the top. I also cut out a piece of green paper (same as the bookcase and a few other things in the living room) to tie that color in and also cover up the manila of my pending paperwork file.

So, there ya have it... the "after" of one project completed!!