38 Flowers

The first piece of furniture I bought to kick off my spring-painting-frenzy was NOT the first piece of furniture I finished!

My first purchase was this Bassett dresser. I looked at it a couple of times before I broke down and bought it...after all, my husband did leave town...and his space in the garage empty! :-)

Here she is with all her drawers taken out and the handles off...my camera and I still need to develop a better relationship.

Maybe we would if I didn't keep having affairs with furniture...

It's definitely a little bit "retro."

I picked up a quart of "oops" paint in a beautiful aqua blue. My plan was simple...paint the wood blue, paint the pulls and metal trim silver, and spray on a coat of polyacrylic to protect it all.

It didn't quite work out.

EPIC FAIL!!!

I wish I knew exactly what happened. The paint went on beautifully, and all was dandy until I sprayed on the polyacrylic. Then, without warning, ugly yellow stains started to seep up through the paint! It didn't happen everywhere...but it looked awful wherever it did.

I almost swore.

I wasn't willing to give up at that point.

I thought to myself,

"Maybe I can still work with this! I'll make it look like it was on purpose!"

So I decided to glaze it with my Minwax polyshades, just like I used for the cute side table.

The above was a result of that so-NOT-inspired decision. Need a reminder? Here it is again:

It looked like it had been dragged through the mud.

There was nothing left to try. I had to let it dry for several days to let the poly cure--so I could sand it off . And I started over.

Since I had to do all that work over again, though, this time I decided to step it up a notch.

I used my Silhouette (I never mentioned I got a Silhouette for Christmas?? Well, I did!) to cut out dozens of vinyl flowers...

...and I randomly placed them in a cascade across the top and down the front of the dresser.

I liked it. I thought about leaving it like that...but in order to protect the vinyl, I would have had to have tried the polyacrylic again. THAT I was not willing to do!

So using a metallic white acrylic paint, I carefully painted in all of the little vinyl stickers...38 of them, to be exact! It was cold in the garage at 10 o'clock at night. But it was quiet!

The result was a cascade of lovely, shimmery, barely-there flowers.

The "bluer" pictures were taken with the flash on. Those show the flowers better, but it makes the dresser look brighter than it is.




As you may have noticed, I used the original hardware, but I sprayed it all silver. It was missing two of the tiny knobs, so I used two cute blue flower pulls from Hobby Lobby.


I gave up on the polyacrylic idea completely, and, for the first time, tried furniture wax. That was an epic adventure in and of itself! But after many, many, many applications and LOTS of rubbing, I am very pleased with the final outcome!

So there she is...38 Flowers. What do you think?