Sunday 15 July 2012

Productive weekend

I hope everyone has had a wonderful weekend. Here in Milton Keynes, we actually managed a whole day today without any rain !!! It was lovely as it meant that I was able to take Missie Meg the dog for a nice walk today without mud issues....it makes such a difference!!! Having said that, I've just looked at the forecast for the rest of the week and it's rubbish, thoroughly depressing...rain until Friday!

Enough about the weather, what have I been up to this weekend. Well it's been one of those weekends where I have been able to catch up on lots of little jobs, you know those ones that make your "to do" list look a mile long but in reality, each one doesn't take long......there just happens to be a lot of them. So I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself as my list is now much shorter! Among all the "To Doing" I also found time to make a few more bits for my kitchen. This is one of the three green things I made, the other two are still in the drying process so perhaps I'll share those with you when they are actually hanging on the wall.


But the thing I am most pleased with is a project that I started at the beginning of the year!!! Do you recognise these????


Yep, that's right, they are the little cubby hole thingies from Tim Holtz Configurations Boxes. Well after teaching a lot of classes with these, I had quite a number of spare cubby holes hanging around and thought it would be fun to transform them into some sort of storage unit........drum roll please.....


 I made a little chest of drawers from off cuts of greyboard (again, loads left over from old class kits) It was all glued together with Claudine Hellmuth's Multi Medium (I love the matt variety - I use it for everything). I have to say, there were a lot of clamps involved in the gluing process but I think it was really worth it. Once the glue was dry, I covered the whole thing with book pages and set about painting it. I started by painting it with Fresco Finish paints and my first choice was Snowflake with  some Beach Hut dry brushed around the edges. It did look lovely, very clean and fresh.....so not my style!!!! Then I realised that it I wanted to add a metal base and some hardware, it might look better if it were a bit grungier. I got out a few Crafters Workshop stencils and started layering up some designs but it was only when I started to think about drawer pulls did I realise that copper could be the magic colour to transform the whole thing.

These are the Curio Knobs by Tim Holtz that I chose.


And this is what they looked like after the paint treatment and some bead caps & bling!!!

I started the layers of paint with a stippled layer of Fresco Finish Beach Hut. Made sure it was completely dry before stippling on a layer of Hey Pesto. The copper is a actually a product that I have fallen in love with called Treasure Gold. It comes in loads of colours and you can buy it here You only need a tiny little bit of this product on a dry brush, a little bit goes a long way!!

I have got another idea up my sleeve for using up more of the over-flowing pile of cubby hole boxes.......a much larger project........I may need a whole week to pull that one together, but the idea makes me very excited.

Righty ho, that's me for today.
Hope you can manage to stay dry this week.
Lin


6 comments:

Helen said...

Love those knobs! What a great little storage box.

kyla said...

Oh how fabulous. No idea what greyboard is but I may try something similar with mount board. Now I just need to find 24 boxes so I can make an advent box (reckon each one will hold a couple of decent boozy choccies!).

Thanks for the inspiration.
Kyla

Anonymous said...

Such a great project, it's gorgeous.

TAM said...

Two brilliant projects - especially loving your use of those spare little cubby hole boxes and looking forward to what you do with the rest of them.

Unknown said...

I love how you have thought laterally and turned one of your cubby hole boxes into such a fantastic chest - can't wait to see your next creative project with another box

Wilma said...

Wow, love it!