Awards!

I want to take a minute to thank Full Circle Creations for giving me the One Lovely Blog Award

...and The Uncluttered Lifestyle for The Versatile Blogger Award!

I am honored, Ladies!

Now I get to share seven things about me!

1. I am Montana-born-and-bred. No matter how long I live in Utah, Montana will always be my home!
2. I don't eat fresh fruit; I have "texture" issues with it. Bake it in a pie, and then we'll talk.
3. I love lilacs and iris. Lilacs remind me of my mother; iris remind me of my dad.
4. I have a Masters degree in Chemical Engineering. Don't do anything with it, though!
5. I want to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and help build a house someday.
6. I can't stand to wear fingernail polish.
7. I want to travel, and I want to start with a trip to England!

I am choosing five amazing blogs to pass these awards along to. Check them out!

1. West Furniture Revival
2. My Life: Planned in Pencil
3. Itsy Bits and Pieces
4. That's My Letter
5. A Vintage Affaire

Tres Chic!

This project has been featured at:

Thanks!!

*************************************************************************

I have been caught up in the number craze for quite some time now.... I have put numbers on stools, dressers, and desks! And I haven't tired of them yet.

So when I was lucky enough to find two sets of stools just before the Spring Market, I decided to number those as well.

Here are three oak bar stools before:

...and here are the three oak bar stools after a little dark walnut stain, white paint, and number words...but in French!


The next set of bar stools intrigued me because of their metal bases:


If I were guessing, I'd say that these originally had puffy vinyl seats on them, but they had obviously been replaced with these boring wood rounds. I decided to make them a little less boring...and I am so sorry that I don't have better "after" pictures; that got forgotten in the excitement of the day!

So here's a glimpse. I painted the tops in aqua blue, and used silver paint for numerals in brackets. Then washed over the tops with diluted white acrylic paint.

The number craze...I'm a proud fanatic! :-)

Seagulls to Sunshine....

....otherwise entitled, "You Are My Sunshine," Take 2!!

I love my recycled sheep-to-Sunshine canvas so much I decided to re-create it.

It actually wasn't a bad painting...just not what I wanted. I took the canvas out of the frame, and I have saved the frame for another use!


I followed the same process as before, using some latex paint, some spray paint, and some acrylic paint! Here's my second creation:

This canvas is 24" x 30", so not quite as large as the first one...but still pretty big! This one also has more of a gently distressed finish. I have gone back and forth over whether to keep the bigger canvas or the smaller one...and I think I will keep the huge one.

Better in Black

It is well known that I have an abiding love affair for pressed-back chairs (as evidenced here, here, and here). In fact, I think altogether I have painted something like 21 pressed-back chairs, all in various shades of white! However, about two weeks ago I was seized with a sudden urge to do a set in BLACK. Lucky for me, I found the perfect dining set to fill the need!

I got a 48" round oak table with a lovely pedestal base. As you can see, the finish on the top was in poor shape.


And six of these gorgeous pressed-back chairs. They are the first of this design that I've seen!

There are two arm chairs in the set.

I wiped all the chairs down with Liquid Sander/Deglosser. It's wonderful for curvy spindles and the like. One chair required some repair work, but then I set up my "assembly line."

It was wonderful to have good weather to work outside this week!

I sanded the top of the table down to bare wood. I am never afraid of a poor finish on the top--that just makes it easier to sand down! More to be scared of are those thick, ultra-durable finishes that take hours to sand off. The base and apron were painted black.


There's not too much to be excited about when the chairs are completely painted in flat black. At this point, you might wonder what you have done...

But then you attack them all with sandpaper and a few coats of polyurethane, and look what you have instead!

Look at me! I'm so pretty!

I love that no two are exactly the same...

Without the leaf, you have a pretty round table to seat four:

Some pretty legs...



Or you can put the 24" leaf in to seat a couple more.

My kids got all excited when I brought this one in the house to take pictures (it's sitting in our front room at the moment), and asked if we were going to keep it...


If I thought I could keep it all to myself...and not have to sit at a table that always seems perpetually jam-sticky...I just might!

This dining set has SOLD.