The Saga of Sam: Part Two
Trial and error has been the way in which I have learned to do almost everything, because I without fail manage to mess up pretty much everything on the first try. I dive right in, full of enthusiasm and guns blazing, and usually end up internally cursing myself as I stare at the results of a foolhardy lack of preparedness. Of course, hitting rock bottom and staring at a big, steaming pile of 'what am I going to do now?', is when I am my most put together and brilliant. In a crisis, I am Queen. I am the last minute, pull it together, Kingpin of Procrastination, and being forced to come up with a unique and doable solution, especially under pressure, has lead to some of my best and most beloved work.
Cue this pile of disappointment.
In my last post about 'Sam', you saw how my enthusiasm and the allure of no prep chalk paint led to a series of poor choices that resulted in stains bleeding through pretty much everything that I threw at this dresser. And to add insult to injury, the eco friendly napkins I used to decoupage over the stains [a plan that failed spectacularly] resulted in a deep yellowing stain just...everywhere. To see how we got from the dresser above to the mess below, click here.
The napkin treatment was supposed to look like faded wallpaper or printed wood. The problem was the distinct yellowing of the napkins that not only failed to cover up Sam, but had dashed my vision of a white dresser and caused me to walk away to rethink my approach.
After a good night's sleep I decided that I would go back downstairs and assess where the dresser was and how bad the yellowing had really gotten. Was it salvageable? Would I have to completely rethink what I wanted to do and make another run for supplies? If you doubt how much yellowing and bleeding the napkins had done, I invite you to examine exhibit A:
The original napkins vs the Podged ones. Pretty noticeable. There was no getting around it, I would have to start over. So I scraped, sanded, peeled and picked until there was nothing left of the lilies and my canvas was (relatively) blank.
Since some of the paint had peeled off the fronts of the drawers and the top of dresser, I went ahead and distressed the rest of the piece in a similar fashion, to level the playing field. After walking past it in my basement for a few days, without a solution to stop the old finish from bleeding through, I decided that if I couldn't beat 'em, join 'em.
I decided to try layering paint colours over top of one another, so that if and when the stains did bleed through, I could sand and distress in those areas, revealing what looks like layers of previous paint jobs in warm colours that would mask the red/brown staining. The dresser proceeded to go through several incarnations after this stage.
First I applied watered down orange latex paint over the worse-for-wear white chalk paint. Looks strange, I know.
Stranger looking still, I painted over top of the white and orange with a soft, watered down yellow. It almost had a peach-y vibe at this point.
Then, last minute, I decided to cover the whole darn thing in turquoise. You might be able to see in this photo that I had started to dry brush the top of the dresser with more white paint. The turquoise was just looking so flat, so I brush on a few layers of white paint to add some interest.
And we're talking barely any paint on the brush. Satisfied with the way it was working out, I decided to stop there for the night, and wait until the next morning to start distressing. If you want to see how it all turns out, stay tuned!
