Love Knots

Hello!  Since my trip to Puerto Rico has been delayed, I've been laden with boredom.   My routine of waking up at 10, hitting the gym and then checking my pulse for signs of life for the rest of the day has become..well..boring. I'm counting down the days until I move to my new place closer to DC.  With that comes looking for furniture!  I have a wonderful chest of drawers that was asking for a makeover. I spent alot (I mean alot) of time looking for the right materials, designs, ideas, etc.  And I've finally finished it!

Materials:

BIN Shellac Primer ($10)

Behr Paint in Royal Paradise ($20)

Spray Paint in Glossy White ($3)

Exacto Knife ($5)

Clear Filmy Plastic Folder (What you put documents in)

1. Let's look at the before:

The chest is made of  teakwood and the front and top of the chest are laminate wood.  This was a problem because you can't use regular primer on laminate.  So I did some bloogling (googled various blogs) and found out about BIN Shellac Primer.  It lets you prime any surface for painting.  Perfect!  The only issue I had with this is that it dries in 45 minutes which is good and bad.  Good because I can get to the next step right away, bad because if I need to go over a section again, the drying paint starts to make patches and gets sticky.  I had to sand it down after it dried to smooth out the surface. (Make sure to do all your painting outside or in a well ventilated area! The Shellac is very strong)

Next, I painted several coats of Royal Paradise to get a dark rich blue.  I spent forever looking for a design that I like and wouldn't be too difficult to stencil.  Spots are too childish and I didn't want to stencil out a huge ornate design.  Finally I found it!

It's called a love knot.  I kinda stole the idea from Diane Von Furstenburg's collection of jewelry and shoes.

Photo credit: Stylehive and Shoe Hysteria.

I found an image, scaled it down to fit my drawers using Photoshop and then taped the image to a clear plastic document sleeve.  Then I took an Exacto  knife and traced out the image.  Initially I tried cardboard with a box cutter but the stencil looked too ragged on the edges.  I took the stencil placed it on the drawer and wrapped a towel around the edges.  The towel soaks up stray spray while painting.  After I spray painted all my stencil drawings, I brought out the blue again and painted one coat over the spray paint.  Since the spray paint was glossy it shows through the blue just enough to see the image but hides stray spray marks. 

Final Product: (Note: I'm still searching for cute knobs to replace the black ones and I have some minor retourching to do at the bottom.  All in all though, I like it for my first home project!)