From before

Last weekend, I did several quick little decorating projects.

The first was to take the painted string that I salvaged from my temporary wall decoration a while back (string wetted with paint and coiled onto a big sheet of graph paper in a large oval) and make a wreath out of it. I decided what size I was aiming for, and then found a book of corresponding size to wrap the string around, to keep the length of each turn consistent. When I was nearing the end of the string, I slipped the wreath off the book, and then used the rest of the string to wrap and hold the coils together.

The string had some entrenched tangles in it, from when I was wrestling with it while the paint was still wet. I arranged those as best I could, and painted them pink and green to simulate flower accents. The finished wreath went on the front door as spring decor.

The next project was to cover a cardboard box with fabric, for prettier storage of toddler clothes. Last weekend, my mother-in-law dropped off a considerable load of toys, books, art supplies, and fabric from her house. My initial idea was to cover the box with paint and fabric, but then I found a piece of fabric that I liked. It was large enough that I didn’t want to cut it, but to allow for it to be re-used for something else later, so I decided to skip the paint and gather the fabric up around the box instead, securing it at the top edge by sewing it directly to the cardboard by hand. The tradeoff is that the box’s lines are softened, and lose some visual tidiness.

Before I sewed it, I decided that I might as well line the inside of the box with fabric as well, and found a piece from my stash. It was tricky to drape and pin it so that it followed the inside contours of the box, with the raw edges gathered and tucked in at the top, and the grain of the fabric more or less aligned with the box. I whipstitched the outer and inner fabric together at the top edge, and it was done.

The third project was to repaint a wooden tray that I use to hold baby blankets. I still had a little of the white string paint left from back when, and I wanted to use it up. I mixed in a little craft paint to tint it, and gave the tray a coat.

These painting projects turn out much more nicely if you unload the excess paint from the brush each time you fill it, and put the paint on in thin coats. I only did one coat, and called it good, although I do have enough paint left to do another layer; the original color of the tray shows through a little more than I would like.

A further tip would be to do some surface preparation beforehand, and give it a light sanding, and possibly even prime it. In this case, the piece was old enough to have been pre-roughened, so it’s not a big deal that I didn’t remember to think of that.