Rise and Spray and Shine

Unless you’ve been under an internet crafting rock (or experiencing a month like we’ve had… erHEM… then again, these projects have been around for a year or so…), you have probably seen tutorial or two about painting your old shoes. Tutprials such as this one (using nail polish) or this one (with craft paint) or this one (with just straight up spray paint) to give your old shoes a new life outside the depths of your closets.

Enter my loafers, a sunny and warm spring day, and a few too many cans of spray paint.

I’ve had these shoes for… hmm… well, for a long while. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, they have seen better days, and because the last light of day they have seen was the inside of the bag heading to Goodwill, I figured I had nothing to lose even if the paint didn’t take. So I taped them up, shook up a can of paint laying around from another project, and haaaaaaaad at it. No I didn’t do anything special like clean them, or scuff them, stuff them, or even dust them off. I wasn’t convinced it was going to work. Plus, I really wanted yellow shoes, so if the spray painting didn’t work, I wouldn’t have wasted a trip to the hardware store to buy yet another can of paint. If it did, I’d do a better job the second time around.

Well, it worked. I had purple shoes. But I didn’t wear them so much. Never did get out of the house to find the perfect shade of yellow.

So I decided, on a whim, to use up the last of the Silver Run n’ Buff, a metallic wax finish, from yet another project for the dining room. I put a little dab on a soft rag, rubbed it in, and buffed it out. Yes, the name of the product also doubles as the instructions, clever you for noticing!

Now I have shiny metallic purple shoes that I wear. All. The. Time.

Not so bad for a project that cost absolutely nothing.

Another Project :: Stage Two

Onto stage two!

Last year, with two of the kids and a cousin visiting from overseas, we took a trip to California. It was right before we closed on the house, and after more than two years of renting, I couldn’t wait to get into it and make it our own. And then I came across this paper. Seafoam green and fire engine red, the very colors I wanted in my dining room.

The paper has been patiently waiting for its debut while I tried to figure out what to do with it. Once I saw those chargers I knew exactly how they and my lovely patient paper were going to come together.

To get it all done, I first needed to adhere the paper to the platter after I got it all shiny and silvery gold. A thin layer of mod podge was how I rolled with this one.

I dry brushed a bit of the silver wax and buffed it to take of the excess.

Just enough to make it, you know, shiny.

Then I added a letter (with some instant gratification, I mean, hot glue)…

and another…

and two more, and then I hung them all up.

Simple enough instruction right?

Now that we have a few readers in the house, I’m hoping they’ll use this as a gentle reminder of what we do in this room…

…and if what we do in this room is DINE hopefully it will lead to less toys left here and more kept in the playroom.

Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?

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:: Linking Up To ::
Funky Junk Interiors

Another Project

A few weeks ago I found four wooden chargers in our local consignment store, just waiting for a good home. Far be it from me to leave them waiting, all alone, covered in dust, under a table.

I had a plan.

Took me a while to get to it, but stage one is now complete! Three coats of Rub n’ Buff, first applied in Antique Gold, then in Silver, then hit again very lightly with a bit of the gold. Those three coats took me less than twenty minutes to complete for all four chargers. When I think of how long it would’ve taken me to spray paint them, with all that cut work, and all those light, steady coats! Oy! So happy I used the wax!

I love how it left some of the dark in the crevices, making it looked antiqued with an aged patina with really no effort on my part. I think it’s going to work well for the next part of the project, to be completed tomorrow! Can’t wait to show you!