Dear Clever Chick: Painting Basics
Naive Person Who Thinks I Have Skills: I have an art project question for you. I bought these ornate, fancy picture frames on craigslist and they turned out to be a yellowish gold color that doesn’t look good with any of my pictures. I want to either distress it or paint it (I’m leaning towards painting). Do you have any tips or ideas I can try?
Me Pretending to be Competent: I wouldn’t try distressing, just because that yellow color might still be visible (depending on the frame). If you’re going to paint it, since it’s a small project I would just go to a craft supply store and get a tube of acrylic paint that you like. Acrylic is the kind you can clean up with just soap and water, whereas oil requires turpentine, and also takes days to dry.
Acrylic will dry a tiny bit darker than it looks when it’s wet, so if you’re trying to match a specific color that might be important. If you don’t have a brush already, just get a cheap-ish one at the craft store. They should have the brushes grouped by what they’re used for, so just find one for acrylic paint.
I would take the whole frame apart (Edit: What I mean by this is separate the wood frame part from the glass and backing, so you don’t worry about getting paint on them), paint it over newspaper, then let it dry overnight. It probably won’t take that long to fully dry, but I can never be patient, so I always end up with finger prints on stuff where I “tested” it (Edit: This is completely true).
If you want to protect the coating once you’re done, you can get clear spray paint to coat it with. You can get different levels of shininess, and they have it at Wal-mart for around $3. Since it’s a picture frame, you might not have to worry about that. We use it on things that will be handled and moved around to prevent chipping. (Edit: Higher gloss levels make the object easier to clean. I have used clear coats on things I’ve spray painted as well, and it works great).
So there you go. Advice, basic knowledge, and the laziest blog post possible. Do you have blog fodder crafting questions? Send them to me, and I’ll do my best to stay sober while I respond.
Hang Stuff Up: Part Duex
A few months ago, I conceived of a project to organize many areas of my house with one simple method: hang stuff up. Using only one board and some nails, I can create more organization for my jewelry, my closet, Hubby’s closet, AND the coat closet. Seem to good to be true? It’s not. I’m just a procrastinator. With my necklaces displayed and organzied I was fine, until it got cold here and I couldn’t find my scarves. All the pieces I needed had been cut and drilled. All that was left was final touches.
I painted all three the same color. I need to use this paint up, which was my main reasoning.
Nail placement is very important to this project. This one is for Hubby’s ties, scarves, and belts, so it’s ok for the nails to be closer together. (I smashed my thumb twice doing this, and I’m sure none of you are shocked. If you are, it’s probably because you don’t believe I only hit myself with a hammer two times. They don’t call me That Coordinated Chick!)
The top one has a few longer nails, and they’re spaced out to accomodate my think winter scarves in the hall closet. The middle one is for my closet, and will be holding bandanas, and whatever else I can cram onto it.
Here’s the hall closet one, all stocked for winter.
Yes, Hubby has a plastic samurai sword on his. At least it’s not on the floor anymore! (“That Clever Chick: Advice for all your weapon-storing needs”).
Look how cute mine is! I mean, everything of mine is cute, so this just enhances the cuteness. I love that even when I’m not wearing them, my cute accessories are looking cute and dressing up my boring closet.
Why keep things that are meant to be seen locked up in drawers or boxes?
Crafty Gifts
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately crafting for friends and family, like the cake topper and wedding favors for my sister, Beans. This post is going to show some of those gifts, and serve as an excuse for not doing many crafting posts.
For Jessica, I made a tiny gnome head magnet (which is part of an on-going weird joke between us), and a box of Cadbury creme eggs, of which I did not steal ONE.
This is a necklace for my sis, Beans, inspired by a recycle poster, which is why the tree is made of arrows.
UPDATE: I found the inspiration pic for this:
This is a monster baby. I made it out of some fabric by running it around the sewing machine with no real plan in mind.
He’s wearing a cape with SB on it, which stands for Super Baby. He’s playing super heroes, with his pet cow.
I named the cow Moothusela. This monster baby was made for Kathy Phan-tastic for her birthday.
Nuclear explosion? No problem! Super Baby to the rescue! (The background is part of a painting by my super-talented Hubby). So it just goes to show, being friends with me has its benefits. I love giving handmade gifts whenever I can.
Yes, even more skulls!!
I guess you guys have figured out by this point, that I’m a little obsessed with skulls (as you can see here, and here, and here, oh and here, here, and here). I could wear a different skull t-shirt everyday for a week, and now, I can also accessorize with skulls! When Beans and I went to the thrift store, we found a tangled pile of mardi gras beads with skull and crossbones on them. Of COURSE I brought them home.
I simply cut the skulls loose from the rest of the beads, and threw those away. Yes, they are shiny silver, but that’s nothing some matte white spray paint can’t fix! A few of them, like those in the picture, were missing a bone or two. Hubby snapped the extras off for me, and sanded down the sides.
I decided Day of the Dead was the way to go with these (especially appropriate for Cinco de Mayo). I pulled out my paints and tiny brushes and went nuts! Here’s a mid-way through work picture:
And a couple of finished ones:
I used a fine point sharpee to do the detail work. The one with blood pouring out of its eye sockets is my favorite!
I just mixed small amounts of the colors I wanted, and went from skull to skull adding flowers, leaves, hearts, and other details. I just googled images of Day of the Dead to get inspiration. I can’t wait to do more stuff like this!
Several of these will be for sale at the Rockin’ Mama’s Day Celebration this Saturday, May 7, to benefit SafePlace. I hope to see you there!
I need more skulls in my wardrobe
These shoes were blank, and I decided I would not let that stand. Skulls? Hell yes. You need shoes with a large enough blank area to paint on, shirt paints, and a paint brush. If your shirt paints are older, like mine, you may need a safety pin and paper towels to clean out the nozzle.
I drew the outline on with the shirt paint first, and then filled it in with the paint brush. I did this on both shoes, let it dry completely, and then did another layer.
I made the skulls fairly small, and ended up using my safety pin to draw on the details.
I drew the bones and bow on with the actual tubes of shirt paint.
I think they came out really cute! One thing to be careful of: if you have to open one of the tubes of paint make sure there is nothing anywhere around you that you care about. In fact, put on a poncho and go outside. I opened one, and there was a casualty:
My cell phone is in the line of fire. I just let it dry and peeled it off, but it was about a foot away when I opened the paint. That shows you how large the radius of devastation can be. I’m also lucky I had newspaper down, because a ton of black paint jumped out. The phone just got grazed. But such are the risks of being crafty!
Episode 2: Attack of the Floors
So here we are again, discussing my floor. A chick can get mighty sick of the same project, which is why it took me until now to post all this, when we finished them sometime in July, I think. It’s all a blur of discomfort now. Most of our furniture got moved into the garage, or crammed into other rooms. The only room that was usable was our bedroom upstairs. As I mentioned in the part 1 of this post, all the animals were kept up there almost entirely for about 2 weeks straight. By the time we were done, we were all completely sick of each other.
The part that took the longest in the whole process was the drying time between stages. You had to let all the patching compound dry for at least 24 hours before you could paint over it. The paint we used is a tougher type called floor and porch paint. It comes in premixed colors; you can’t have it mixed like with wall paint. We chose slate gray, so it would be a nice, neutral background for our stuff. We didn’t want anything too dark though, because it would make the whole house look dark.
These are the materials you’ll need: we bought a painting kit that came with the paint tray, 2 rollers, a paint can opener, and some other stuff. You don’t necessarily need the kit, but it was cheaper than buying all the individual stuff we needed. We also got a pole (lower left corner) to attach the roller to. Ask the paint area attendant what type of those yellow rolling things you need, because apparently the different numbers on the packaging mean something.
Remember that we started painting after cleaning the floor EXTREMELY thoroughly. I got on my knees and scrubbed the whole area, about 650 square feet, with a sponge and bucket of water. I also changed the water very frequently. You have to do all the vacuuming and scrubbing before the patching also, don’t forget. We used that blue tape around the base boards, and it turned out to be a huge disappointment. If I had to do it again, I would buy one of those flat edging brushes instead of wasting my time with tape.
Here you can see the before in our “technically-a-dining-area-but-we-call-it-a-library”. The painting process is very straight forward. Stir paint, pour into tray, roll roller in paint, roll on floor. Repeat until floor is covered, and you are trapped sitting on your fireplace with the Buddha statues and dust bunnies for 4 hours until Hubby gets home, then play a real game of “the floor is lava” then paint over your foot prints, which is what you probably should have done in the first place rather than naming all the dust bunnies.
Here you can see a partially painted area, and what the patching looks like. The patching was part of the reason we decided to go with painting, rather than staining the floors, plus all that lovely wall paint the builder sprayed around the edges of the room. The patching will not usually absorb the stain the same way the original concrete does, so you’ll still see the patches. One solution to this, that I’m shamelessly stealing from my mom-in-law, is to stain the floors, then paint about a 6 inch wide stripe around the base of the walls. She taped off the area, then used black paint. It looks really sophisticated, and did not even remotely occur to me. Aren’t you glad I’m here to lend you my stolen ideas? If you don’t give ME credit though, I will find you. And probably flick uncooked beans at your face.
Ah, just what I needed; a picture to get me back on track. This is the completed dining area. After the paint had dried the designated amount of time, we coated it with a clear layer for protection. I also don’t have a picture of that stuff, and it was also in the paint department at Home Depot. It went on white, and dried clear. I used the same roller on a pole to spread it around. It had to dry for 48 hours.
When we pulled back the tape, there were several areas where paint had seeped onto the base boards, or the tape pulled paint off the floor. We were also a bit impatient to get the furniture back in place, and made a couple nicks in the floor ourselves, but it’s nothing a well placed rug didn’t fix!
Here’s the finished area, from a different angle. It came out great, and we have already had several pet accidents, and a couple spilled beers to test the paint. It cleans up great. To clean it I’ve been sweeping, then Swiffering, or vacuuming, and to scrub I used a Swiffer WetJet. It is MUCH faster than vacuuming the whole thing was before. All in all, to refinish 650 square feet cost about $300, total. That’s 50 cents per square foot, which cheaper than even the cheapest tile before installation. If we hadn’t rented that machine, it would have been around $200, but live and learn.
What I would do differently: Put down an extra layer of paint, use an edging brush instead of painter’s tape, and probably do an extra layer of the clear coat, and let everything dry another day before moving the furniture in. It was VERY hard work, so if you attempt this, expect to be sore. As always, I am chock full of useful advice, so if you have any questions, or if I missed something, let me know in the comments. I’m sure I could type about this for HOURS.
Those Infamous Floors
What does infamous mean? More than famous, of course. I have mentioned the floors in our house many times, mostly as an excuse for not blogging enough. I have tons of pictures, and thought it was about time I give you all the basics of how it all went down.
Hubby and I had been discussing what to do with our floors for quite a while. As you should know by now, the carpet is green, and therefore matches nothing. We wanted to do something we could complete and maintain ourselves, since we are, of course, broke and cheap. We also wanted something more pet friendly for the 3 cats and new puppy, meaning easy-to-clean-poo-and-vomit-off-of.
We had discussed concrete floors, and I had even done some preliminary research. There is concrete under the carpet, but I was under the impression that it was fairly low-quality and crumbly, as it appeared in one corner where we pulled up the carpet to investigate. Everything I read online said that you had to get this leveling compound stuff, and basically spread a new layer of nice concrete over the original. This promised to be expensive, and impossible for anyone but a professional to complete properly. We gave up, and decided to deal with the sea of hideousness, for the time being.
One day, I was cleaning under the stove (what, don’t you do that? No? Just me?), and I saw what appeared to be high-quality, smooth concrete. This got me curious, so we pulled back that corner of carpet much further, and saw that the whole slab was in pretty awesome shape, just dirty and covered with duct tape (duct tape?! Oh yes. The previous Home Owners, mentioned and ridiculed thoroughly in one of the posts I linked to above, had oh so safely run electrical wires all along the concrete under the carpet. ‘Fire hazards be damned! I want my surround sound in place as if by magic!” I imagine them saying, in their rage-inducing ignorance).
Once Hubby and I discussed and agreed to painted concrete floors, he went bat-shit crazy, in a useful way. Basically, I came home from work and the stained ocean of ugly was gone!
This is an “in-the-midst” shot from the second floor, looking down.
Hubby went all the way around the rooms pulling the carpet tacks out of the floor. Those are the wooden strips that go around the edge, near the wall, and are full of tiny, brittle, rusty nails that will break off and embed in your flesh. Hubby simply used a hammer to pull them all up. No matter what you do, they cause divets in the floor like the above picture.
They are generally shallow, and they sell patching stuff at Home Depot, I think in the paint department. It was really easy to use, sorry I don’t have a picture. Pay attention to what you get, because they tried to sell us all kinds of random crap. There is premixed stuff you can use, and all you need is a trowel (one of those flat plastic or metal spready things). They tried to sell us powdered stuff we’d have to mix ourselves that had all kinds of crazy warning labels, and on and on. We just asked every different employee in the store until we found what we needed.
We also rented the monstrosity you see pictured above to sand the floors down. This mainly seemed to kick up massive amounts of dust, and cost 80 bucks. If I had to do this whole process over again, I would have skipped that step. There was some glue on the floor, from the carpet installation, which is what we were trying to remove with this thing. The glue ignored it pretty easily. I think we should have used our same strategy for finding the floor patching compound to find a glue solvent. The floor already has hairline cracks running all over, so I knew we were going to end up with a bit of an industrial look. Well, at least I am here to share my wisdom with you.
This is Hubby using the machine. This thing was also ridiculously dangerous, and spun away from him a bunch of times. I was not allowed near, due to my clumsiness. He managed to get it under control, and you can see we both had breathing masks on, but I don’t know how much good they did. We had the presence of mind to shut off the AC, and shut all the doors in the house to keep the dust contained. We bought those really good air filters also, for when we eventually turned the air back on.
After this step, we let the dust settle for 2 days, then vacuumed, swept, dusted, and mopped repeatedly to pick up as much as we could. During the whole process, we kept all the animals locked up in our bedroom. All of us spent the majority of our time in there for probably 2 weeks solid. It was rough.
I guess I’ll make this a 2 part post, this one being the “prep” part. (You can see some awesome before and after pics in my Ikea post, if you can’t wait for part 2). The basics: remove carpet, remove carpet tacks, do not sand floor, clean floor thoroughly, patch holes, let dry thoroughly, then we move onto painting the floor. I have heard that there is acid you can get to etch the floor to prepare it for the painting also, but I have no idea how necessary that is. We have already had a couple spots where paint pulled up, but I don’t know if the acid would have prevented this, or if we needed another layer of paint. See you in the next post!
Earring Holder
Yes! It’s a crafting post! Aren’t you THRILLED? This one is awesome. I have tons of pairs of earrings, way too many for the earring holders I have. They are constantly falling off and making me swear, so I decided to increase capacity this weekend.
You will need: an embroidery hoop, paint, glue, and some kind of loose weave fabric, like lace or fishnet.
Paint the embroidery hoop whatever color your little minion heart desires. I happen to have at least a half dozen embroidery hoops laying around, way more than I’ll ever need to sew things. I painted mine black, let it dry throughly, then painted red glitter on the outer one. Having a lack base coat really makes red glitter stand out much better.
Next, put the fabric into the hoop. Don’t cut anything yet! Use the corner of the fabric, and stretch it across. Tighten the hoop as much as possible. Test your fabric by poking it in the middle. You want it to be taught, but a bit stretchy. You want to make sure it’s not pulling out of the hoop at all. Once you have that ready to go, keep the fabric in the hoop, and cut it away from the larger piece of fabric.
Now cut the fabric down very low, so that only a tiny bit sticks up on the back.
I coated the back edge with glue to make sure the fabric would stay in place. I don’t see how I could ever get the fabric back in place if it slipped even a little, so I decided to prevent that possibility. I used fabric glue, but I think Elmer’s would work just fine here. You just need something that will soak into the fabric, rather than sit on top like a silicon glue would. I let it dry overnight.
This is how awesome it looks now. The flower is actually a hair clip that had nowhere to live, and I think it looks great right there. I put all my black and red earrings on it, and I love it!
You can see why I needed a new earring holder. Yes, I have that many earrings. No, I’m not sharing. The other earring holders are made from Popsicle sticks and window screen material. They were made by my wonderful sis Beans. Yay! Closet cuteness!
Our house, in the middle of our street
Yes, our house is literally in the middle of our street. Hubby and I have been living here for about a year and a half, and this week we are getting down and dirty with home repairs. That is also the reason I am (unfortunately) writing this on his Mac. I can only see half of what I’m typing, so you’ll just have to deal with any errors.
We ripped out the carpet (by “we” I mean Hubby). We have bare concrete floors in the downstairs now, and it feels so nice and cool in this Texas heat. It is dirty right now, but that’s just until we polish and patch and stain it. This whole experience has led to some inadvertent detective work. When we moved in, the walls were bare white, and the carpet was seafoam green. Yuck.
The house is from 1983, but the carpet is not, meaning the previous owners CHOSE green carpet. It matches with nothing, and makes my beautiful moss green couch look tan (Dr. Stacey didn’t even know that it’s green). Working around the baseboards today, I found a tiny scrap of light brown carpet. Light brown! That means the previous owners (we’ll call them the PO’s for short) went from a sensible color of carpet to GREEN! Morons! It’s not that the color is horrible in and of itself, it’s that it matches with nothing. I can’t paint any of the walls anything other than blue, and combine that with green carpet and it would feel like I live in a fish tank.
I also removed an alarm sensor from the wall today. I don’t believe in paying a monthly fee to protect our free TV that only gets the Tejano channels. Under the sensor was a patch of taupe paint. This means they had greean carpet with brownish walls! Uck! It must have looked like the inside of a bayou that never gets cleaned out. (For you yankees, it’s pronounced BUY-you. It’s basically a drainage ditch with concrete sides to prevent flooding in low lying areas. There is generally stagnant water and at least one shopping cart in them. Houston is at sea level and therefore has hundreds of these, which is where it gets the nickname “Bayou City”.)
To top all of that, when we came to look at the house, their furniture was still here. The couch was maroon, navy, and yellow plaid. It was hideous on its own, but add it to the mix of green carpet and taupe walls, and that is one major stink-fest. I hope the PO’s are reading this so they can bitch slap themselves for their stupidity. Martha Stewart probably just involuntarily gagged a little bit without knowing why.
Did I forget to mention they installed flowered wallpaper in the bathroom upside down? It had flowers on it. Flowers grow UP. Plus, they didn’t even bother to cut the edges with scissors. They just slapped it up there, then tore it off by hand, leaving lovely jagged bits everywhere. They also did not smooth it into the corners, they just stretched it across leaving big warped pockets of air in the corners. You owe yourselves another bitch slap for that. I’m not even going to mention all that crap they left in the garage and closets. You selfish bastards are so rude, I hope a car falls through your new house.
If you are going to attempt home improvements by yourself, at least google how to do it first, and try to make it look nice and neat. This is your HOME. If you don’t put in the effort here, where will you? The idiots also caulked a kitchen window shut, which I then had to scrape open. Jerks.
Update: We just replaced our toilets this weekend with low-flows, and found more of the wretched wallpaper behind it! It pulled off easily, because there was MORE wallpaper behind THAT! Pictures will be added soon, once we reassemble our Evil Lair of Doooom!, I mean, computer desk.
Shelf Revamp
A few months ago I decided to reorganize my “Office” which is really my arts and crafts room. There were huge piles of stuff everywhere, and it had basically become a junk room. As part of the clean-up process I discovered this shelf I had acquired at a thrift store. I LOOOVE thrift stores.
Before:
It was beat up, wobbly, and chipped, but I saw potential. I attempted to hammer extra nails into it to strengthen the structure. Unfortunately, I smashed my finger and split the wood. Hubby came to the rescue. He just hammered it back together, since there were nails already in it.
Proof I did at least some of the work myself:
The finished product:
Two coats of my favorite 1950’s turquoise blue, and it looks great!
My “Baby Animals” collection now has a home, next to my 1970’s embroidery, also salvaged from a thrift store. Sweet!
