Close up of the solution

See what I mean?   This is a lot of detail to convey eleven times in a 2 x 1.5 inch space…will have to do some thinking….ouch!

 As you can see the ‘knobs’ are not symmetrical.

Luckily I’ve found a painted mould and the exact same unpainted version.

In the painted one they have used gold to highlight….

Houston we have a problem

Hola Friends!

Long time etc… Been mighty busy, have taken on something not huge but not tiny.

In so doing, I’ve had to reassess certain technical problems that were kind of bugging me.

Basically, the Mermaid’s eye has to come out.  It’s too heavy and simply wrong.

Then I realised that the Rococo shells were not to my liking.  I painted them individually from a drawing, whereas I should have worked from a photo of the the 3-d object.

I like more than I dislike overall, but what I dislike is so in my face, it has to go.

I need to completely understand what those holes at the base of the shells are doing, as they are not convincing in my opinion.  So I washed all of them off and it’s literally back to the drawing board.

But the good thing is, they were easy to paint, in that you keep turning the table top to paint the next and you get into a therapeutic rhythm and before you know it, you’ve completed the circuit.

OK, so because I believe we throw away too many clothes and the planet is choking under the weight of all this waste fibre, I decided to alter and up cycle my clothes.  I find this a very satisfying thing to do, because it saves so much money.  So I’ve sorted out four pairs of trousers, a pair of shorts and a blouse.  

On top of that, I’ve taken on a project that is not going to last forever but it’s going to be intense for a while.  Basically I took over a derelict piece of land.  I walk past this strip of land many times and about 6 weeks ago I was appalled at the state of it.  So having successfully created a wild flower meadow at the front of my parent’s house, by simply throwing mixed wild bird seed at it every Saturday, I realised that if you want to stuff lots of flowers in, you really need a bit of wheat in there too, as you need it to fix the nitrogen.  In organic gardening you always stick in your nitrogen fixers in what they call companion planting.

I did that in my own garden and hence I now have a jungle that I have to hack back now and again.  

Can I say, I know that as I work on this derelict patch of land people are looking at me thinking I will regret what I’ve started, because the soil is so poor and it’s not even flat.  But what they don’t realise is that with organic gardening, you can turn barren soil into a good growing medium in next to no time.  Forget lugging home sack after sack of compost….all you need is a good compost heap from which to make compost tonic and add volcanic ash and wood shavings and you can grow what you like in next to no time.

Oh well I have to go because ‘Always Hungry’ has announced his tummy is rumbling…

Rococo table 7

 Well, things have changed with the table.  After painstakingly cutting and painting all those shells, I realised they just didn’t work and it struck me I had missed a trick….

Basically, the background colour presented an opportunity in its own right….in that the paint contains plaster, so painting directly onto plaster is either a wonderful way to revisit the past e.g. Frescos, or it’s a null and void sell out to darling acrylics.

Well of course I went for the more difficult option of Frescoes and can I say, what wonderful medium….ghostly and very forgiving!

Rococo table 7

 I tidied up the legs over the weekend, they are almost finished, just one more coat of gold furniture paint needed.  It is much easier to paint them having dismantled the table and if I had done that to start with I would have saved about 4 days.  However I needed to see the table assembled to make final colour choices, so I’m not going to beat myself up about that.

I found a really nice gold foil for the background on Marie A, but it does include the name of the chocolate and some cute embossed tiny horses.  I’m OK with that, because the gold is perfect for my purposes, so that is a ‘fill’ as per the script of Margin Call with Kevin Spacey, which is a film I’ve seen now about 38 times.  

Then I painted the shells about 4 times with 2 golds.  I’m a little concerned they are quite flat looking now and am toying with the idea of making them more 3-d?  I’ll do an experiment and see what happens.  

Apart from all of that, I covered yet more of my boxes lying around the place.  I found it much easier to use a sponge roller to apply the school PVA on both the paper and the surface.  I also watered the PVA down a bit because it was drying super fast.  I think the beaded box looks quite Chinese now, which is Ok but unintentional.  This was because I didn’t quite have enough floral paper and so had to include as protective gold border.  The beads are very clever, they are not beads at all and so there is no snagging threat.  

I need to finish the table this week, because I need to make a start on the chest of drawers.  For that I bought legs from China, which are very well made and fit for purpose.  I worry a lot about these projects before I start them and constantly work on them in my head.  I think the sides of the chest will be aged bronze patina, which is very exciting but if it’s not really enough, sort of thing, I might apply the gold so that it looks like faded gilding, now that’s going to be hard, but not impossible, especially if I use a sponge. 

To quote from Margin Call again “Well you’ve gotta come out of the gates storming, no swaps…”

Rococo table 6

 Hi everyone,

I must admit I have been a little distracted by the gorgeous weather and just how many coats of paint you can apply when working outside.

The other thing that happened was I had a massive, really massive tidy up.  It did me good to find old favourites and become enthused by materials that I stashed with good intentions but neglected ever since.  Then something happened to me, where suddenly a lot of ‘stuff’ that was languishing appeared to me like shimmering oases in the desert, whereby I could see the finished item, at long last.

So after that I took on more and more stuff, boxes, paints, tools everywhere... I’m pleased to say quite a few things have been sorted out.

Ok, so the table is basically finished design-wise.  See photos below.   I painstakingly cut out 11 shells in thin card to paint....you guessed it: gold.  I used my Fiskars knife, which is a wicked little tool and makes me want to make more of these things.  The area between the two circular designs worries me a little, but if I think it needs a bit more work, I’ll just cut out more decoupage characters and stick them on... I have a lot of them!  Painting the finished table with a coat of satin varnish will be interesting, but I’ll use hairspray as a fixative first on the images and hopefully there won’t be any colour runs...

I took the table apart to tidy up the legs and made a third arm to rest them on while drying.

Then I covered a heart shaped box, it’s actually quite large but so lovely to glimpse in a stuffed cupboard.  It’s a gift.  Completing the lid gave me a whole stack of ideas for seascapes and golden sunsets etc.  

The great thing about crepe papering the top was it makes the paper much more durable.  I covered it horizontally because the pink paper which is divine had to be used the same way because I only had one sheet.  The paper looks like embroidered fabric, which is so adorable p.  It cost £2.50 a sheet about 10 years ago from Athena.

Then I painted another box with Rustoleum Pearlescent spray paint, over eggshell. I don’t have a picture of that, but in amongst it all I did an automatic colour drawing of a person that popped into my head.

Then I painted another box with a rose stencil or stamper, again by Rustoleum and decorated yet another box that was housing paints.

Rococo table 5

 Busy busy busy....

Ok so here is the colour of dreams.  It’s Rustoleum’s Belgrave, chalk furniture paint and it is absolutely perfecto.  When wet it is darker than you want, then when it dries it is soooo beautiful.

But, there is always a but.... it is such a vibrant blue, the shells I made looked very wrong for it.  So I decided as I’m trying to suggest mouldings, I would just use thin card.

Then I had to sort out the green stripes I mentioned.  Luckily my Fiskars knife thingy proved to be a very good investment.  So here are the pictures and hope you like them....

Rococo table 4

Well, that’s the last time I say I expect something to be easy.  The stencil at the bottom is the one I’ll use.  It’s not as precise all over as it needs to be, because all I was after was a time-saving device for the relationship between all seven sections radiating from the centre.  I will be hand painting the rest.  Considering I have to paint 16 shells, TG for stencils.  I also made the stencil less symmetrical because Rococo does not use symmetry.  

Ok so the table has changed colour from the green you can see above.  I faithfully copied Italian paint, where they used layers of scrumblimg and then some ochre.  I ended up with this, which was nice but just not peaceful enough for tea in the garden.  So I stripped it and painted it white again with undercoat and will top coat it later today, hopefully.  The final colour is going to be heavenly, durable and a unanimous decision between me and Alwayshungry. 

The shell motif was going well, then it was not.  I couldn’t find my modelling knife and virtually turned the house upside down and inside out trying to find it.  Anyway, it’s all sorted out now. So the shell will be half hand painted and half stencil.  If it doesn’t look as I hope it will, I will re-think that detail.  The main problem I have now is this new colour that the table will be.

Then there is the background green stripes around Marie problem, that has to go.  It occurs to me that I could paint a gold background, which would be so nice, but I’m keeping my mind open on that, as she may need some sky instead?

I coated the stencil in nail varnish to make it waterproof, as I don’t want it to become soggy and limp.

It’s very hot in little England now and that makes we want to tidy up, big time.  I seem to have a lot of miscellaneous items in the wrong places and I’m a person that if I can’t find something in under 05 minutes I start to get very grouchy.  Thank Goodness for plastic crates!