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Showing posts with label shabby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shabby. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Painting Fool

Painting has been wonderfully theraputic for me lately. It's immediate: I can pick it up whenever I want to and get a few minutes of painting in; and unlike working with clay, I don't have to wash my hands a million times and hermetically seal my work area against dust. :)


Besides, paint has been on sale at my favorite craft stores!


Here is a wooden rocket birdhouse I found and fell in love with. I mean, a rocket! I just had to paint it in girly colors:


It resides happily in my office now.




This is a statue I found in Target's dollar section (even though it was $2.50). It was a brownish-black color, so I brightened him up a bit:



I made his belly shiny so I can rub it for luck!


I am an absolute sucker for good perfume, especially well-made perfume oils (see here and here and here). I am so addicted to these perfumes that I decided I needed to store them in something pretty. I had to make a little treasure box to store my perfumes in.


I took a bottle of perfume with me to the craft store to see if it would fit in the boxes. The one below was a winner, and at the time, I liked the handle. Not so sure now, but I'm working with it. I wanted to do some kind of theme at first, like painting it sky blue and doing grass, flowers, and a picket fence around the sides. I wanted to paint it all white, with pink flowers all over, and do either green felt or polymer clay grass on the lid, and place tiny flowers on it. Then I wanted to do glitter "grass" on the lid.

I knew I wanted some kind of plushy interior, but my usual felt box lining just wouldn't do in this case. When I was a kid, I liked to take things apart, and one of the things I took apart once was a jewelry box. I observed that the cushy lining was actually a piece of cardboard with some kind of spongy filler, and covered in satin and slapped on the insides of the box. Perfect! I had some fiberfill languishing in my work area, and I had some cardboard.

Now for the fabric. One place I go to has all kinds of great fat quarters; awesome patterns. It's hard not to just keep your mind on a specific project when looking at these: I can never come out of there with just one! There are always "future projects" to think about!

As I was looking through the fat quarters, I happened upon a small glimpse of yellow buried in a row of purple. I took a look at the fabric, and was immediately transported to my childhood. It reminded me of something I'd seen as a kid, and I fell in love with it. Right then I decided I had to have it and imagined a "shabby chic" kind of box to go with it. I like SOME shabby chic, and I don't think I've ever made anything shabby, but I was willing to try. The shabby theme was the only thing to go with this fabric!




Now I'm almost done with the box; trying to figure out if I should antique it or not. Pics soon!