Thursday, April 19, 2012

And a little more paint

goes even further!

I was trying to get as close as I could to my favorite crayon I remember from my childhood: Cornflower. Remember that color? And I'm not usually drawn to blues, unless they're being cried out on a street corner with an acoustic guitar. Actually, I had a love-hate relationship with my cornflower crayon. I loved the way the crayon looked on its own, but the color that emerged from it was never the same on paper. No matter how hard I bore down, I couldn't get it dark enough. And I never understood why a color with the word corn in it would be blue-violet. But here's why:

This is a cornflower! I must say I got darn close with the color. Once in a blue-violet moon, my memory will serve me pretty well.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

A little paint

goes a long way.

I wish I had taken a Before photo of this chest. It is solid wood, currently with no hinges (hopefully to be fixed soon!). I bought it from a woman on Craigslist who was going through a divorce and selling all her crap. I went to her house to buy an advertised bookcase (which I did), and she talked me into this chest. Even though it was stained a hideous dark, dark wood color and broken, I felt kind of bad for her. So I paid her the five bucks or whatever it was she asked for it, then spent the next hour and a half listening sympathetically as she told me the story of her break-up. Don't feel too bad, it really does seem like it's for the best, and I left on a positive note. A year later, I uncovered it in our garage. Oh yeah! I had just finished priming our antique vanity cabinet, and I figured while I had the white paint out, why not throw a quick coat on this? Try four not quick coats. But it looks just how I was envisioning it, and after purposefully distressing my lovely paint job with a sander and screwing in some Anthropologie knobs, here it sits in the sunroom, soaking up some ricocheting beauty from my mother's artwork.