What else do we do?

Muddaritaville Stencils were born out of my love for signs, and graphics.  I wanted to make it easier to embellish a piece of furniture or paint a sign.  I some of the first items I created for customers were personalized signs, I am obsessed with adding a touch of personalization to creations.

Some of you may have found us for the stencils we create and we are so grateful for that!  On this post I want to share a few of the other items we produce here at Muddaritaville along with a hi light of items we will add to the website in 2014.

This is a sign I painted for my sister for Christmas.
Did I tell you I LOVE signs!

This is a cutting board I created for my sister.  When we aren't busy cutting stencils with our Trotec Laser  we also do personalization.  We will be adding cutting boards to the site in 2014, I'm leaning toward a line of Bamboo cutting boards. (we'll keep you posted)

This another cutting board created for my stepmother Norma.

This board is Bamboo, I love the way it engraves!

Well I had to make one for my kitchen!

This was a special project for a friend of Frank's.  It was a Christmas gift for his friend's wife. This is a picture of her horse, Frank did some work in Photoshop so the image would look good when engraved on the board, while he was doing that I looked up some Horse Quotes. We brought it all together on this one of a kind Gift!

Another one of a kind gift for this couple who purchased their first home in 2013 and are getting married in 2014.

I LOVE creating these one of a kind items that are treasured by their owners. 

I'm so excited for what 2014 will bring!

All the best to you and yours this Holiday Season.

Somewhere in Time Armoire

I have been hunting on and off for an Armoire that had great lines AND would fit our flat screen TV. Most that I found on Kijiji were too small or plain.  Then one day on Facebook I saw an Armoire that Kathy from Karma Fine Furnishings had posted.  My first thought was "it's gonna be out of my budget"
I did a happy dance when I found out it was in my budget and that it came in two pieces cus I had no idea how we would move it if it was one piece.  The Armoire Gods were looking out for me, well and Kathy too since she negotiated a great price with the owner for me!

Here she is in her former glory ...

She has a patchwork like veneer which was starting to lift in a few areas.  I knew I wanted to use van Gogh embossing plaster on it so I wasn't concerned.

Our next challenge was coming up with a theme for the piece.  Overall we are trying to decorate our little bungalow with a Cottage/Beach feel.   So initially I was looking at embossing a pattern of Ornamental grasses (sea oats) on the front, then I considered butterflies with a motivational saying.  We kept coming back to the fact that it was a TV Armoire and we should give it a movie theme.  In addition to that the piece reminded us of one you might see in a hotel room so we started googling Movie and Hotel themes and one of our favourite movies "Somewhere in Time" came up.  Oh ya!  That's it!  Since this piece is for our personal use and not for sale we weren't worried about using graphics from the movie. 

This is the inspiration for one of stencil images.

I traced the image, rearranged it to fit one of the Armoire doors then I bridged it to create a stencil.

For the right hand door we decided to use a nostalgic logo for the Grand Hotel which is the setting for the movie.

I used an Ultra Cut stencil material which has a sticky back, I tend to use this for large embossing plaster projects and for one time use.

Then I applied the plaster, I learn from every project I do, we should have removed the doors first and worked on a horizontal surface.  It was a hot day so the plaster wanted to run a little when applied on a vertical surface.  No worries, all worked out OK.

Oh, did I mention that I painted the whole Armoire in van Gogh paint, the colour is Halo.

This is not the final colour but I wanted to distress through to white and wood in my final finish.

Above is the piece painted white, and the embossing plaster applied.

Here is a closer shot of the embossing plaster which shows the areas where the plaster ran a bit in the heat (see Elise's tear).  I gave the embossing plaster a light sand to remove any sharp points before painting over.

Here are the doors with one coat of paint over the plaster.

At this point I decided life would be a lot easier if the doors were removed for distressing and so I could paint the interior of the unit. This image above is after the piece is painted and distressed to show the embossed image.  BTW, this van Gogh colour is one of our Muddaritaville Signature colours called Beach Glass.  

This image shows the interior painted with van Gogh Revenge which is a gorgeous black.  I wanted the TV and components to blend into the background.  I cured the doors with Chalk so they could be used as Chalkboards for messages.  I did not apply any topcoat to the interior at all!  I might regret this in the component area as it might be harder to keep dust free (I'll let ya know)

Here's door #1 with a message. I think I'm going to invest in some Chalk Markers, I broke the chalk about 5 times drawing this little message and there was chalk dust everywhere!

According to Frank I should change the above message daily, yup, I'm right on that!

The doors don't stay open like this they fold right back but this gives you an idea of how the black interior works with the components.

To finish the piece I wet distressed to expose the white base coat, and some wood, then I applied van Gogh Cabinet Glaze.  I could leave it like this the Cabinet Glaze is suitable as a top coat.

I may work with the glaze a bit more and maybe apply wax too but for now I'm happy to live with it a while.  Heck, it only took 4 months to get it to this point!

Tada!

Thank you so much for stopping by!

JoJo 

I'll be partying over here this week

Artwork with van Gogh Furniture Make-up

Whenever I want to try a new colour combination on a piece of furniture I like to test it first.  Just before I started work on a recent Test board Frank suggested that I make it a piece of art that could potentially accessorize the sideboard we were about to paint.  Brilliant!  I had been working on some new stencil art based on an image transfer from the Graphics Fairy, so I decided to test it on this piece.  Do you love the Graphics Fairy as much as I do?

I painted a Restore cabinet door in Balsamic first, once it was dry I placed my stencil.  For this stencil I used a sticky back 8.5 mil Ultra Mask material.

Here is the cabinet with the embossing plaster in place, now it's time to let it dry.  This is a large area so it took about 3 hours for the plaster to dry.

After the plaster dried I gave it a coat of Revenge (black)

Once the Revenge dried I gave the piece a coat of Muddaritaville's studio colour "Sangria"  it's a burgundy red.  I love the translucent quality of this.  I left this overnight to dry.

I then gave the piece a coat of Cashmere (which I later changed to Muse but I didn't photograph those steps)  Isn't it funny when you go through a stage of not liking your results you stop taking pictures.  Oh well, not to worry, we got it back on track!

Here is the final reveal, with Muse as the top coat of paint, then distressed and waxed.

Isn't it fun?!  My passion is in working on pieces like this.

Thanks for stopping by!

Kona Coffee Sack Table ...

I saw Donna was having a Grain Sack party and I had to join in!  Grain Sacks were my inspiration for this piece.

We purchased this coffee table just after moving into our house 2.5 years ago.  It was a Kijiji deal from the same seller we purchased our Ektorp sofas from, the coffee table and matching end table were $40. The are really sturdy and REALLY ugly!  I've been threatening to paint them since Day 1 but my vision for them kept changing.  

Here she is ... So Pretty, ummm nope, but useful yes!

I started by giving the table a really good clean.  The table has a checkboard wood pattern on the top and I wanted to minimize that from showing through so I decided to sand the surface.  Then I turned the table on it's side and painted the sides and legs with van Gogh Chalk paint (vGCP) in Bole.

 Once the base was dry I let it sit for ummm 2 weeks.  Yep!  Every day I got more and more frustrated with the lack of space in our laundry room, aka The Studio.  Ahhh! are you freakin kidding me.  Note in the picture above right side is our dryer, I have about 10" between the dryer and the edge of the table.  Anyway after Christmas I finally got my S*!t together and decided to paint the top.  First I gave it a coat of vGCP in Cashmere, once that was dry I rolled on Serenity one strip at a time.

While the Serenity was still wet I dragged a Kitchen Scrubby through the paint to create a look of a burlap sack.

Next I created a stencil for the stripes, I'm too impatient to tape out the lines.  I taped a guide line on the  table so I didn't end up with lines that weren't straight (I do not trust myself to be accurate).

Once the stripes were complete I felt the burlap sack effect was not strong enough, so I took out the RL Linen effect brush and dry brushed the base paint Cashmere over Serenity in a cross hatch pattern.  That's better!

Next I added a Kona Coffee Logo, I created a stencil for this too.

Do you see my mistake here?  I didn't notice it until I was waxing the table.  Once the stencil was dry I lightly distressed the stencilled areas and table top.

Now can you see the mistake?  When I weeded my stencil I didn't remove the period after the U so I had to realign the stencil and fix it.

All Fixed!

My original intention was to wax the base and use Table Top finish on the top where the daily use happens.  Do you do anything different when finishing pieces the you are selling compared to those you plan on keeping?  We have a new puppy so we don't really put much on the table right now, well other then our feet now& then.  I love the wax finish so I decided to wax the top of the table.  I used both clear and dark wax.

Here is a shot of the top of the table, I still need to add more wax but I ran out!  Yep, this wax is so great I sold out, and I'm OK with that.

I'll leave you with this final image of Molly inspecting the room.



I'm partying over at Funky Junk this week!