O'verlays

I MAY have mentioned once, twice, a thousand times how much I adore Danika over at Gorgeous Shiny Things.  She was my first blog follower who I didn't know personally, and I still don't know how she finds all the little bloglets at the beginning and follows them as they become full fledged blogs.  She shared one of her past homes as my first guest flashback Friday post.  She posted the girl's room and the botanicals I made based on their curtains (which reminds me: things are changing up there: stay tuned).  She even set me up with a "Stylish blogger" award.  As if that wasn't enough, she has been an endless resource when it comes to the design biz, both on and off line.

This multi-talented lady has been very busy developing an awesome new product.  The idea started when she created this fretwork for the front of a client's ikea cabinets.





Can you even believe the transformation?

Well, Danika teamed up with Cheryle of the Whole Nine Yards, and the two of them created a line of fretwork panels that you can buy online and add to furniture that needs a little lift.  Here are some of my favorite applications, from their website:







Super fun, right?

Go on over and check them out here, and tell Danika I sent you!

What would you dream up for one of these bad boys?  I always love to hear your DIY ideas.

Ta Da!

At long last, the ottoman is done.

Maybe.

Shall we review? (Is it embarrassing to admit that I am seeing this in my mind as a flip book and the song running through my head is that old Music Together classic, Happy Puppy Dog?).  Here goes.

In the store

Glass = Dangerous for kiddos.  I know, let's make it an ottoman!  Cut wood.

Get foam

Paint Frame purple.  Oops!  Spraypaint black.

Reupholster with the wrong fabric.

Reupholster with the right fabric.

Freehand some rub n buff.  Oops!

Tape off the stripes and try it again

Ah, finished.  No?

More gold = More tape.  Lots and lots of tape.  Table bondage.

Perhaps should not have done this step under the influence of a glass (or two?) of wine.

But it turned out okay and let's be honest, I will probably not fix it.  One more time: Before.

And after.

Love it, hate it, or total ambivalence, you gotta admit it's quite a big change!

Oh.  Why is it only maybe done?  Well, I'm thinking all the gold precludes the need for nailhead trim, but I'm going to live with it for a while before I make the final call.

What do you think?  

Thanks for sticking with me on this one.  I'm usually a done-in-a-day, for-better-or-probably-for-worse kind of a gal when it comes to projects, so this one has been a bit of a stretch.

What about you: are you in the middle of any interminable projects these days?  Do tell!

Rub n Buff

At the behest of many of you, I decided to move forward and add more detail to the ottoman.  Not having an upholstery hammer or spacing guide on hand, and encountering the problem of very hard wood to secure the nail head into, I tackled the gold trim first on the theory that perhaps it would be enough bling, and I could avoid the nail head altogether (though I think this is proving untrue--tell me what you think.)  Also, is nail head one word or two?  Blogger's spell check is going crazy when I try to make it one.

To add a little bit of gold, I picked up a $3 tube of rub n buff at Michaels.  There was grecian gold, gold leaf, and antique gold, with no indication of what the difference between them might be.  I guessed and went antique.  Lots of bloggers use this product, and my aunt Eileen, who is a guru in such matters, recommended it to me, and warned me that a little goes a long way.

For some reason, I thought I could just freehand it.  The edges of the ottoman have these grooves routed out, and it seemed easy enough to paint within the lines, but I quickly discovered this was not true.  Do you ever do something stupid and think to yourself how stupid it is as you do it, but figure out it all works out in the end as long as you don't fall/hurt yourself/break anything/ruin anything?  I did not practice with the rub n buff before applying it directly to the ottoman, and even though it was clear with the very first brush stroke that this was not going to work itself out, I continued to paint the whole line.

A fine mess.

So out came the painters tape.

(This is when it feels like an octagon has more than eight sides.  They just kept coming!)

Things worked out much more even, all around.

It feels a tiny bit bright to me (though doesn't really appear too bright in the pictures), but I'm going to sit with it for a few days before I do anything more to it.  And then I will break down and tackle the nail head.  Probably.

Ottoman fabric

Oh, the ottoman.

When I bought this octagon cocktail table on a whim at a thrift store, I didn't plan on turning it into an ottoman, so I wasn't really considering how I would design the thing.  When I did start ruminating a while back, I quickly realized there was a problem.  It's called a bright orange moroccan tile rug.

Don't get me wrong: I LOVE my living room rug.  Orange is our favorite color, and I think it has been established that I love all things Moroccan and all kinds of repetitive graphic patterns.  The trouble, when brining in other fabrics, is the scale of the pattern.  When we first moved in, I bought the Parker Armchair from Crate and Barrel only to discover immediately upon bringing them into the house that the two patterns fought each other, despite a coordinated color scheme and similar points of origin (the suzani and the moorish tile are both middle eastern.)  It was all about the scale.

Yet, if I was designing this ottoman based on the lines of the piece, I would definitely choose a large scale ethnic pattern, not unlike the embroidered indian fabric on the inspiration piece.  Since the room couldn't take a print like that, I had to come at it another way.  I already had a brown couch, a green armchair, and a flokati pillow for solids.  I already had an embroidered african textile and block printed throw pillows for small scale pattern.  Pattern-wise, the room needed a not-too-solid textured neutral, or a stripe.

Also, I should mention the other problem: money.  After the paint debacle, the fabric had to be cheap.  There would be no vintage suzanis or kuba cloth or excellent dhurries for this ottoman, no sirree.

I found a great heavy duty fabric in a sort of basket weave that mimicked the rattan of the table's bottom.  Even better: it had a sort of rubberized finish which seemed durable, and it was a neutral straw with some white running through it.  To be honest, I really waffled on this, but in a fit of impatience decided to put it on after I opened up the canvas dropcloth I had picked up as a neutral alternative and discovered big black imperfections in the fabric.  Thanks again, Home Depot.

I immediately felt that it was too yellow, too beachy, with the black base.  Don't you think?  On a white or natural wood base and in a beach house, it would be perfect.  One last pass at the fabric warehouse turned up a fabric I liked, for $7.50 a yard.  It was off white and a sort of golden tan to pick up on the paler neutal colors in the room, and best of all, it had a dark brown to black pinstitch running through it, which both gave it an ethnic vibe and tied it in to the black base.  It was a stripe without being too stripey.  I decided to add the fabric right over the straw, which was much stronger than the new fabric and gave the piece a stable base.

While, again, I didn't really want a directional fabric on the piece, I do like the stripe in the room.  I like the way the cream and tan sort of cool down the other colors, like the hot orange rug and the hot pink, green, and blue in the 70s oil paintings that are hanging in there.

But I'm not finished.  The next decision: whether to glam it up with details or leave well enough alone.  I have these brass and black nailheads that I was planning to space about an inch apart all along the edge (back when I thought I was going totally drop-cloth neutral).

And I have a tube of gold rub n buff, just ready to trim out the details on the base.  What do you think: glam it up, or keep it simple?

Progress, people, progress.

The Ottoman

Oh, my cocktail table turned ottoman, you have been an unnecessary saga.  And this has become an unnecessarially long post.

To be honest, I sort of avoided sharing the process as I went, because for a while there I wasn't sue it was all going to work out.  And I don't want to bore you with the details, but I did learn an important lesson or two, so let's get to those.

Here's what I was starting with.

A sort of fruitwood octagon cocktail table with a glass top, which I snagged on a whim for $29 from a consignment shop.  When my husband suggested that the glass might not hold up to a 2 and 4 year old, I decided to turn it into an ottoman, like one I saw on the cover of House Beautiful.

I would fill in the hole with plywood:

Add a piece of custom-cut 2 inch standard density foam to the top:

And upholster it.

And then the design process began in my brain.  The first big question:  is it all about the top, meaning, do I focus on fabulous fabric with an overscale pattern and even consider skirting it to play up the shape?  Or do I make it all about the base?  I'll share some of the inspiration images that went into this process later this week (a little backwards, I know--this is what happens when bloggers don't blog about projects as they go), but in the end I decided to play up the base.

For my living room, a black base was really the only way to go.  Now, here's where things start to go wrong. I knew that what I really wanted was an ebony stain, but that meant a crazy amount of stripping and sanding, and we're not talking about flat surfaces here.  My husband had a bad run in stripping 80 years of paint off the front door at our Brooklyn house, and did a good job of talking me out of this.  If I wasn't going to strip and stain, then I wanted lacquer.  So I read up on a couple of different lacquering processes, but, no surprise, they all take about 18 steps (with lots of sanding and LOTS of different materials that I did not have on hand), so I decided to paint it.

So this is kind of wussing out, but still seems reasonable enough, right? When we moved into this house, I decided to do things properly, which has resulted in me learning to pinch pleat draperies, painting 4 coats of paint to get an even finish, figuring out how to make pleated lampshades, and more.  In this case, "proper" painting meant oil-based paint.  I went to a couple of stores before I could even find it, and then discovered that a quart is $25.00.  I didn't discover this until after I had a quart mixed, however, and I like to think that the price tag (especially when you throw in primer and natural bristle brushes), would have stopped me in my tracks.  Then, instead of just buying the black off the shelf and adding a few drops of red for warmth, which is what I should have done, I got all fancy and chose a custom color at the suggestion of the (adorable) paint guy.

Black Bean Soup.  That's the color we decided on.  I wanted a very slight purple undertone to work with the wood stain on my side tables.  I cleaned, dried, and primed the whole piece, then opened up the can of paint, which sure did look EXACTLY like black bean soup.  I went ahead and started painting, despite my misgivings about the color, telling myself that the light was bad in the basement and it would turn out all right.

After letting it dry overnight, I brought it up to the living room, just as my husband was coming in.  It was a nice, sunny, day, and what do you think my husband said to me?

"Why did you paint the coffee table purple?"

Uh huh.  Good question.

So I took the 20 minute drive back to the paint store and begged them to make my $25 worth of purple-black paint black-black.  And they tried.  But we ended up somewhere in the region of mud brown.  And this little side project was starting to send me close to the intersection of batshit and crazy.

This post is way too long.  I know it.  Especially for a Monday.  But it would really be dragging it out to break this up into stages, especially after the fact.  I'm almost done.

At this point, I took it up with my husband, who would prefer not to discuss decorating but can see when an intervention is needed.  (Okay, none of this is such a big deal except that I was feeling the investment of time--all the thinking, researching and planning--and money for that damn expensive paint.)  Here's where the first important lesson comes in.  He said to me:  If you received this piece today, in this condition, what would you do with it?

See what he did there?  He removed all of my investment, which was clouding my judgement.

I went to Home Depot to get a can of black spraypaint.  (Thank goodness the kid working the register did not ask for my ID, as the touch screen suggested he should do, because it was in the pocket of the sweatshirt I had worn to the gym, which was at home.)  I bought the cheapest kind, in black semi-gloss.  At $2.99, I considered buying 2 cans, just in case, but then remembered the $25 oil paint.

And, of course, one can was not enough.  And my three local hardware stores did not carry the brand I bought, and there was no way that I was risking two different blacks or two different finishes at this point.  So I picked up my kids from school, dragged them to Home Depot, and bought another can.  This time I DID get IDed, and thank goodness I had retrieved my license back to my wallet where it belongs.

I finished the final coat in one half of the yard while the kids played in the other half, making me a bad parent on top of everything else.

And let it hang out in the living room for a while, to get a feel for the thing.  You can see that the paint is a little patchy in spots, and if this was the final form of the piece it would not do.  But put a top on it, and many sins are invisible.

I realize that I should have just spraypainted it in the first place.  Herein lies the next important lesson for the two of you who are still with me.  When you are doing DIY projects, it is important to consider the original piece when you decide what to put into it.  In this case, we're talking about a solid piece of furniture, but not exactly valuable.  I realize now that while it will end up pretty nice, it never had the potential to be a showstopper, so why treat it like one?  You can certainly elevate a piece with the right materials, but in some cases the easiest and cheapest solution might be the best.

Stay tuned for the upholstery stage.

Flashback Friday: The First Ottoman we Built

While it often feels like I remember every piece of furniture and every home accessory I have purchased (and where it came from and how much I paid and how much I saved from the original price), I sometimes have glaring omissions in my memory.  Like the other day, when I was going on and on about how I would never choose a red couch, only to realize I have a red couch.  I bought it off craiglist for $40 and always sort of intended to get a new slipcover for it (its the super basic couch from Ikea.)  I know it seems crazy to forget about a major piece of furniture currently in your house, but it's in the basement and I rarely use it and really, I wanted something different.  Denial much?

While I was in the process of planning the cocktail table turned ottoman project, I was talking to my husband about it and he answered one of my questions by saying "I don't know--I've never built an ottoman."  Again, I was all, "I know honey, but you can still help me figure this out," and he was all, "I was being sarcastic--remember the orange ottoman?"

The orange ottoman!  How could I forget!  After our older daughter was born, we wanted to do away with pointy edged things, including the coffee table.  When we couldn't find an ottoman the size we desired, we built one.  The thing was over 4' square: how could I forget??

[photo credit: me.  model: Clio and the "make-out monkey".  You're welcome!]

So, how to do it.  Dave built a big box with a flat bottom and an open top.  I used upholstery webbing to make a forgiving top, stapling it to the outside of the box.  We added foam, a layer of batting, and a set of legs we bought online in unfinished pine and stained.  The fabric came from a remnant bin and the nailhead is french trim, which comes on a big roll and you only actually hammer in every 8th nail or so.  I can't remember why I didn't seam the corners, but instead I used a sort of tuck -- it was a casual look that worked but that I probably wouldn't repeat.  The hardest thing about this project was finishing the edges--for some reason, the legs had to be screwed in before the piece was upholstered, so rather than stapling the fabric underneath, I had to staple it right to the edge, with the fabric turned under, and then cover it with nailhead.

All of which is to say, ottoman-building is completely doable, though I think I prefer my new method of upholstering a coffee table.  Much simpler when you don't have to build the frame!

Have you built any custom projects for your home?  Did you forget all about them like I did?

MY in-laws are on their way to town for the holiday weekend.  I'll be back on Tuesday--enjoy it!

Heather

In Which I Use the Power Tools

I've got a little project going. I keep thinking I'm going to whip these things out, and then realize they take some time.

Remember the new coffee table?

Well, as my husband feared, the glass top is not the most child-friendly. But I love the shape in the room, so I wanted to figure out how to work with it, and then I got inspired by this.



Okay, I love everything about this room. It's sort of "global traditional," a look I have always been keen on. I love the color palette. I love everything about Indian textiles and fanciful flourishes, and what's not to love about this octagon ottoman?

So it was determined some time ago that my glass coffee table would become an ottoman. And being a copier, I would love to just use some embroidered paisley and some tassel trim and do it right up. Except that my living room already has that moorish tile rug in orange. And an ikat fabric in orange and red and green and blue. And a different fabric on each of three upholstered pieces. Plus the coffee table does not have the simple legs of the inspiration one, meaning I might need a simple fabric, which is not generally my first instinct. So the fabric is a work in progress, but I decided to go ahead and get started on the project.

After some debate, Dave and I decided to--are you ready for this?--do the simplest, most straightforward thing. It's true! After much talk of kraft paper patterns and graph paper scale drawings, we just put the glass right on the plywood and TRACED it. Take that, pattern maker. (Now, I'm sure you don't need a tutorial on tracing. I am including this photo to remind myself that every once in a while, we CAN do things the easy way! And also, that sometimes Dave helps me with these projects.)



And then I got a lesson in power tools. As I explained to Dave, I have no fear of tools, it's just that it's much easier to have him do projects for me than it is to do them myself. But then, he's not always around, and I am impatient, and so...



Jigsaw master.



The plywood is a bit thicker than the glass was, but once the foam and batting and fabric is on there, I don't think it's going to matter. (Says the Queen of Jinx.)

Stay tuned!

Continent wall treatment: How To

After sharing a sneak-peek at Oliver's nursery last week, I had a few people ask about how we ultimately decided to go about painting the continents. This tutorial will probably be boring to some of you, but I promise I'll be back with something fun tomorrow: a reader design dilemma about mixed-gender shared kids rooms. Good stuff.

First, I should say that Oliver's parents finally decided to go for the map treatment we had been considering after I showed them a picture of Max's room, over at Janell's blog. They could finally visualize it in a room, and with the more neutral color palette we decided to go big and use all the walls, not just the alcove.

Okay, so I considered a number of options before we proceeded paint. I thought freehanding the maps would be fine (I'm such a dork, I used to draw freehand maps for fun), except we were doing all the continents, on sloped walls, and I thought the overall perspective would get off if I made it up as I went along. Next I considered using that trick where you draw a grid over your image and draw a corresponding grid on your wall in order to keep your perspective in line, but I didn't want to deal with erasing the grid lines from the original wall color. Plus I wanted to get a sense of the placement before I made ANY marks. The whole thing became much simpler once I decided to just go ahead and invest in a projector. (Believe me, I can see many uses for this thing!)



After reading lots of reviews, I chose the tracer from artograph because the viewfinder window is 5 inches (meaning, it can project an original image that is 5 x 5 inches; lots could only do 3", which really isn't very much) and because it could enlarge that image up to 14 times. Since I knew I was planning on continents that were several feet tall, this was completely necessary. Also, it was reasonably priced. They go for anywhere from $49 into the $80s, depending on where you buy.

To get my map source material, I did a google image search for "world map outline," knowing that it would be simplest to deal with a single, strong outline and not something more detailed so I wouldn't have to figure out what to keep in and what to leave out as I was tracing it to the wall. I found a few that had the right level of detail to the outline and the right shape on the page (some were more slanted than others, especially North America.) One weird word of warning: lots of map sites seem to carry viruses, so my Norton was pretty busy.

Once I had my images, I just copied them to be a full page on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper, printed them out, and, where necessary, drew over the outline with a fine-tip marker to make it bolder--the projector is not all that powerful.





The projector called for a REALLY dark room, and we did end up taping cardboard over the windows. I played around until we found the right size and placement on the wall, propping the projector on a box, propping the box up with books, and moving the whole contraption closer to and farther from the wall until we got it just right. It's a good idea to tape the picture down to your surface and mark the projector's placement on the paper--just trace around the corners of the projector with a pencil--because the thing can definitely slip. I learned the hard way that trying to realign the image on the wall is nearly impossible.

Once all of that preparation was done, I simply used a pencil and traced the outline of the map right on the wall.



That's florida.

Next, we used a mini foam roller and some wide, flat artist brushes to paint in the continents with our main color--a no-VOC paint in "Coastal Sand," which seems quite fitting. The paint was regular latex interior housepaint in an eggshell finish, same as the walls. We gave it two coats. This was easy but time consuming.



There's Australia, all coastal sandy.

Finally, we came back in with a dark brown paint to edge everything out. I used a brush from my kids' watercolors (we have plenty of extras from used-up paint sets), and cut it down by half or more so the bristles would be firm--before I did this, I found that some of the bristles went rogue and gave a sloppy line. I was able to adjust the level of detail to the edges in this step for the best effect.



And voila, Australia and assorted Pacific islands.

So there you have it. As with so many things, the better prepared you are, the easier the project will be.

Oliver's grandma is finishing up one final sewing project for the room and bringing it up next weekend, so I should be able to share the final "after" next week. It's looking good, and we're excited!

Process, a love/hate story

Do you ever do that thing where you take a simple thing and make it ten times harder? No? Well, I do. All the time. In fact, it's kind of my favorite past time. I finished a pair of simple projects today after trying them the hard way first, and, perhaps against my better judgment, I'm going to share all of my mistakes. Fun, right? Fun. Only because I have a finished product that I'm happy (enough) with.

Remember how I was thinking about the styling options for the rattan swing chair in the girls' room? My original intention was to recover the gross brown cushion that came with the chair, but when I settled down to do it, back around New Year's, I discovered that the foam inside was disintegrating. I was feeling all cocky and I decided to use the denser foam left over from making the girls headboards to do something custom, and went to work cutting two half circles, using spray adhesive to attach them to one another, and using a kitchen knife to shave down the edges so they'd be rounded. So far, so good. Next, I traced two circles in the fabric and three long strips the width of the foam, plus a seam allowance.


Look how confident I was feeling: I started taking photos to document the process, for a little tutorial, I suppose. If I had looked for a tutorial in the first place, from someone who knew what they were doing, none of this would have been a problem.

I didn't want to worry about the pattern being mismatched from the circles to the strip along the edge, and there was no way I was piping this thing, so I had the genius idea to gather the strip for a super-cute ruched effect. So I sewed three strips together and hand-basted both sides and created this long worm of a ruched side section.

I pinned it to one of the circles, sewed it together, feeling good. Well, it was when I started to pin the second circle to the whole thing that I realized the problem: there was no way I was getting the foam inside the cushion once it was all put together.

And there was no way I was getting the whole thing stitched closed, with all that fancy ruching. And I wasn't about to inset a zipper.

And then it dawned on me: I wasn't trying to make a little cushion, I was trying to upholster one. It had seemed so clear in my head, you know? Until I realized I had it all wrong.

Okay, weeks pass. Yesterday I finally decided to take the disaster apart and just copy the original cushion, like I should have done in the first place. I pinned the two circles with right sides together, sewed most of the way around, turned it right side out, stuffed it with the leftover batting from the headboard project, sewed the opening closed, and tufted the cushion in four places just like the original. And it took, like, half an hour? Or less? Like what I should have done in the first place.

Only.

I brought it upstairs, feeling all good about it even though the circle was a little lopsided because I got a little sloppy (which can happen on the second go-round), and tossed it into the chair.

And.

It was Too. Small.

I never re-measured! I didn't even think about the different construction of the two pillows, just went ahead making assumptions. It doesn't look so bad in this picture, but I have it centered--if you push it back (and little girls climbing in will inevitable push it back), you have several inches of rattan showing at the front. But there was no fabric left. And, of course, seeing it in there I LOVED that fabric there. And the whole point was to do something for no money, so buying more of the fabric wasn't an option.

Enter project number 2.

One day a while back, Clio had grabbed her pillow off her bed and put it in the chair, reminding me that sometimes function will simply reveal itself. It just so happens that I had a plain white sham that came with the girls' duvet sets, and a huge spool of green grosgrain ribbon that I bought years ago at the Manhattan Antiques show. So I set to work customizing, thinking, again, what a simple little project this would be. I laid out the ribbon approximately how I wanted it to be.

Measured in from the sides for an even line. Drew it all around.

Used a spray adhesive to attach the ribbon. Easy, right?


Wrong! After the 24 hour cure time, the ribbon just fell off the pillowcase, just a bit stiffer, as if the adhesive was starch. That was all around New Year's, too. I guess I was feeling ambitious....and then squelched.

Fast forward back to yesterday, when I realized that the back pillow would solve the problem of the too-small seat cushion, so I dug out my second failed project, determined to do it right. This time around, I got some fabric glue, used for hems, etc, and used that to attach the ribbon. It was a mess to use, and thus no photos, but once I got the ribbon on, mitered corners and all, I covered it with brown grocery bags, put some heavy books on top (oh, the perks of being an art history major!), and when I came back this morning the ribbon had actually adhered. I used the sewing machine to tack down the mitered corners (and only once sewed the case closed), and...done.

This would have been a lot easier to do on a piece o fabric before it was configured into a sham, but then, I suppose, I would have had to make the sham. And nothing slows down a project like changing the thread color on the machine.

I took it to the girls room, threw it on the bed, and liked it so much I thought I was going to have to make another one for the other bed.


Luckily, I also like it in the chair. And I especially like the way the two projects worked out, together.
Cute, right?

I'm slightly less fond of the fact that a 1-2 hour set of projects took 5-6 hours, plus 6 weeks. (Though, to be fair, I might have had less of a problem the first time around if I hadn't been multitasking--er, watching Damages--at the same time.)

But all's well that ends well, and I probably learned a lesson or two, too.

I hope this makes any DIYers out there feel better about their own moments of idiocy (you have had them right?)

Have you had them? Do tell.