Armoire Redo Do Over

We’ve had this armoire for almost 20 years. It’s been used in just about every room and has served many functions over the years. Currently it stores art supplies and has been stored in a spare room. I decided to move it into the family room, but it needed a makeover.

I’ve been on a color kick lately and wanted to do something fun with this armoire, but also keep with my current theme of the family room – whatever that may actually be.

First, I gave it a white wash, then I drew a chinese double luck symbol on the front of it.

I Masked off the design to keep the lines of the symbol straight as I painted it. (I should point out I looked for a stencil, but had no luck finding one the right size, so I decided to give it a go free hand). Taping off the design was very tedious. It took me almost two episodes of Law and Order to complete and definitely took me longer to do than the drawing and painting of it.

Did I mention this was my second attempt at painting this design? On the first go, I didn’t mask off the design.  This led to a few uneven spots and each time I would attempt to “fix” a line that was either too thick here or too thin there, I would only make things worse. The only solution was to sand the design off and start over. I’ll never again convince my self that if I’m very careful and patient I can paint a straight line free hand.

I also replaced the round, chunky knobs with the brushed silver handles which I happened to get on sale at Target for $9.98 for a set of six – marked down from $19.99.   I recently found other handles I thought worked better at Ikea – 6 for 2.99.

So, until the next makeover – this is it.

Indian Inspired Collage

Acrylic on canvas. Also: glitter, coins, tissue paper, scrap paper.

What started out as a quick “throw it together decoration” turned into something a bit more (as is usually the case). It evolved into a story about a spiritual journey and how all spiritual ideologies are woven together in some way. It is also about what one might hope to find on a spiritual journey – usually peace right? Sometimes we may attempt to find peace with material things; represented by the coins. Maybe we search for peace by surrounding ourselves with nature.  We may deeply identify with certain symbols or icons and assign them spiritual significance.

The lotus flower represents enlightenment, peace, serenity – Spiritual Utopia. I found it interesting that the scraps of tissue paper, once adhered to the blue acrylic paint, appeared as islands. I thought of what it would be like journey across the ocean as early explorers did, which is what led me to make the white destination line from “island” to “island” around the elusive Utopia.

I’m saying it is Indian inspired, but it originally started out Chinese inspired. I found I was gravitating towards Hindu images for some reason; perhaps because of the bold colors i wanted to incorporate into the collage.  The idea for this collage is not entirely my own. I really didn’t want to spend a lot of time creating something so I searched the internet for ideas. I came across a few works I found inspirational and thought would give me a quick push towards a finished project. As I began working on this it began to develop a deeper meaning and a real story evolved. I enjoyed working on this and it only took me about four days to complete, but that is really only working on it for a few hours a day.

Window Treatment for Living Room Project
This is a window treatment I created for the living room makeover. As mentioned, in that makeover I went with a color scheme completely out side my comfort zone. I wanted a big change on a small budget, so I had to get creative with what I already had on hand.

These are Soji screens. I purchased four of them several years ago and they have served many purposes in various decorating projects. One of my favorite uses for them were as  lighted wall panels in the master bedroom. For this project I am going to make them into a modified valance.

First, I removed the paper from the screens. A very easy job – just wet the paper and peel off. Then I had to paint them white, though the light wood is nice, I wanted them to be white. This took a while, as I had to work the paint into every corner.

I made this project more difficult than it had to be because I used a glue gun to glue in all the fabric pieces separately. A staple gun would have been quicker. To give it a clean look from the back I covered the entire back with a double layer of sheer patterned fabric (which is also visible from the front through a few of the squares in the screen). For this I used a desk top stapler (my staple gun broke) but finished up the last half with a glue gun because I got sick of fighting with the desk stapler. 

the final out come

The total time including purchasing the fabric (which I had already spotted a few days before) was about 8 hours – that’s with a few interruptions as well.

Total cost: $10.00 for a bundle of fabric quilting squares.
I had all other supplies on hand.