Took advantage of our quickly diminishing warm and dry days last week to get a bunch of outdoors painting projects done. First on the list was this adorable primitive child size desk.
It had a very ‘sloppy’ semi gloss varnish on it with lots of visible drips. So, the first step was to sand. I really enjoy the sanding process, and ‘getting to know’ the piece. This piece was obviously hand crafted by ‘make do’ kind of person. It wasn’t the best wood, and wasn’t really constructed ‘to last’. No dovetail joints like you might expect to find on a piece this obviously old. But someone had signed the underside of the desk. Alas, it was too faded to read, still, I ‘left it be’.
Notice how blotchy it looks after I sanded it??? From this I can tell it was made from ‘rough sawn’ wood; boards that had not been planed. I really had NOT noticed this about the wood until I sanded it, and was a bit concerned that the saw marks would show when I distressed after painting.
Here you can see the nails that it was put together with, and more of the saw marks. At this point I’m resigning myself to NOT distressing this piece after painting it lest those pesky saw marks show in the distressed areas.
Even the legs were made with the rough cut wood! Definitely a primitive piece, and one that I would have left ‘as is’ back when I was decorating my home in fold art primitives. But that was then, and this is NOW. So it got painted!
Gave it a couple of coats of paint and let it dry. Started very carefully sanding, making sure I only hit the edges lest those pesky saw marks showed through. I really REALLY wanted to distress the whole thing, so I decided to ‘give it a shot’ and ‘test distressed’ one of the legs to see how badly the saw marks came through.
They looked just fine!!! So I went ahead and distressed the whole thing!
The desk top distressed especially nice; showing the pretty wood grain.
Now that the outside of the desk was all brightly colored and prettied up, the INside seemed a bit dingy.
So I decoupaged some old atlas paged on the bottom. I wanted to cover the entire inside, but with how the legs come through it would have been too many tiny corners to work around.
The desk has gone to my booth at Stars with a $59.00 price tag.
I’ve also taken in some Halloween decor to Stars.
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