Full Moon

Lately I've been fascinated with all the wonderful makeovers you can give to old furniture.  There's a whole blogosphere out there that is all about people taking an old piece of furniture and giving it a new lease on life by painting it and being creative.  I'm taking baby steps into the crazy, exciting world.  Check out some of the links at the bottom of this blog post http://missmustardseed.com/2013/02/furniture-feature-friday-a-link-party-7/

A few weeks ago I bought this little end table for $4.99 at the Sally Ann.  It was in rough shape and a bit wobbly.  The wobbly part was easy to fix, I just had to tighten up the three bolts underneath the top.  Now I was so excited about it that I started sanding it right away before taking a photo.  Try to imagine the top darker with lots of water marks.

I loved the grain on the top.  It is a veneer, a very, very thin veneer.  There were some chunks out of it along the edges, which I patched up. Some sections were lifting, along a join.  I glued them back down.  Then more sanding.  I didn't get it perfect, but I had to stop, or else I would have sanded the veneer away.   Even though it doesn't appear so in the pictures, each of the three lobes were the same size.  I guess I never had the camera directly over the center.

Here it is stained and a top coat of a few layers of water based poly.

The legs were painted with a homemade chalk paint, and then a dark glaze brushed over it.  Most of it I rubbed off, just left a bit around the junction of different pieces of wood.  It didn't have a lot of edges, but I did sand them off a little bit.  Both the glaze and the sanding help to give the impression of age, not that this picture really shows up either technique very well.

This picture shows the colour of the top most accurately.  

Larry looked at it and said well he guessed it was supposed to be a shamrock.  He said though, that to him the left and right lobes looked like two cheeks, and not the kind on your face.  He said he didn't know what the third lobe was though.  I said it was the sun rising over a full moon.