“Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is.”
~Charles M. Schulz
I've been wanting to post about some of my painted furniture for some time. I last shared this about three years ago, and I know many have not seen this before. In our previous house, we had a really nice screened-in porch. I had been looking for some kind of a table to place in front of our glider. I finally found an unfinished little bench at one of the flea markets we went to. It was only $10! It had some kind of marks on it, which is why I think I got it so cheap; but I was going to paint it anyways, so it really didn't matter...
I painted this before I even had a blog, so I never took photos during the process. After I primed and painted it with white craft paint, it came time to mark off the placements for the harlequin design I wanted. I wanted everything to match up just right, so that's where all my math came into play. FYI, I
never used a stencil for this. If you look at the bench above, you see two rows of green on the top and both their points come to the edges, both in length and width; and I was able to get one row of green on the sides, that ran from the top edge to the bottom edge.
I painted it with a sage green craft paint. All I can say is thank goodness for paint tape. Then the next fun part began, the fleur de lis...
I wasn't about to paint these free hand and I had searched both online and in stores for the right size stencil, without any success. I finally decided to make my own, so I got on the internet to see how to do this. I also searched the internet for a fleur de lis pattern to use. Everything was the wrong shape or the wrong size. I finally found the design I liked and scaled it down in size to print off. I traced it onto my plain stencil sheet and then proceeded to cut with my exacto knife. Whew! I finally got the stencil I wanted and got them stenciled on. Remember, this was before the Cricut and Silhouette. Then I took my paintbrush and black paint and filled them in and touched them up so they would look painted, not stenciled...
To make it pop a bit, I decided to add the color of raspberry on the underside on each side, along with the black edging. You can see this in the next couple of pictures...
I loved this bench so much that I decided to keep it when we had our estate sale. Unfortunately, it doesn't look nearly as nice in our guest room as it did on our porch. I decided to try and sell it, so I took it to one of my shows in 2013. It never sold, but then again, it was more of a craft show than an art show.
When we had the estate sale, Mr. Cottage and I had to make a lot of decisions on what to keep and what to get rid of. The problem we had was we didn't know where we were moving to and if we would have room for many of the items. Looking back now, we know we could have, and in some cases, should have kept many of the things that were sold. One thing I really miss is our bistro set on our porch...
Again, no before photos; but when I bought this at an estate sale, it was a hideous rust color with ugly vinyl seats. I ended up spray painting it raspberry and then found some good outdoor fabric and recovered the cushions. I loved using this table for computer work, reading the paper, drinking coffee or iced tea. Now it's gone to another house, and it's probably another color...
But we have a deck where we are and I really miss that table. If I only knew then, what I know now; I think we would have kept it. Regrets, yes; but there's nothing to do but move on and maybe I'll luck out and find something similar down the road.
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