My mom was purging this table a while back, and given my love of all things chinoiserie and its unique size and shape, I claimed it before my brothers could (sibling life...). Like most things we moved into our new house in Florida, I still love the table, but it's DARK and HEAVY when I want this space to be light(!) and bright(!) So I did what any gal in my position would do - pulled out the chalk paint and the Cricut!
Knowing I was going to do white accents, I chose a pretty cornflower blue chalk paint for the base color. I was still in the early days of developing this house's style (and still am!) and thought it would be a pretty versatile color to match - could be coastal but also could be bold.
Now we paint! I used foam brushes for this whole project to keep the paint texture as smooth as possible. Because I was using chalk paint, I didn't prime the table but ended up having to do three coats to fully cover the dark brown. I've heard a rumor that if you want to paint something dark a light color easily, first paint it gray. Unfortunately I can't speak to the validity of that rumor at this particular juncture, but lmk if you've tried this method!
Once the table was fully blue-ified, I broke up the blue by painting the table's rim and part of the base with white chalk paint and then moved on to the stenciled parts. I definitely wanted to keep the chinoiserie feel that the table originally had so I found pagoda, geisha, and cherry blossom images in Cricut Design Space.
The geisha was very ornate (i.e. a LOT of weeding and teensy tiny stencil pieces), so to make this project slightly easier, I trimmed down some of her detail by welding shapes on top of the detail to be removed. I cut the images first using cardstock so I could play around with layout and sizing, and once I had the design I wanted, I cut them using Cricut's stencil vinyl and then weeded.
From there, it was as easy as sticking the stencil vinyl (it's sticky, just like normal vinyl) to the table and filling in the stencil with white chalk paint! It turned out so fun, and I love that I was able to turn a memorable piece into something uniquely my own.
shop the post:
Comments