Bless This Mess

Okay, several of you have “heard” about the desk I did for one of Ashley’s Christmas presents, and I promised to post pictures… well, here they are!  (Don’t think I’m lame for giving her a desk.  She asked repeatedly and included in her note to Santa that she really wanted a desk for Christmas!  And she’s loving it!)

Paul wanted to document the process, so here’s me, covered in dust!

He he!

This desk was in pretty good shape.  It is laminate, and I had heard terrible things that people had gone through when they’ve tried to paint laminate, so I did a ton of research.  Basically, I had to sand the gloss off of it, use a really super good primer and then paint it!  I think the primer made a huge difference.

Here’s how it turned out!

I bought several scrapbook papers, cut them into quarters and then mod podged them onto the top!  Easy peasy, just took time and a lot of mod podge.  For the drawers, I just measured and cut, then pasted on.

Once the glue was dry, Paul put on 3 coats of a polyurethane finish so if would be water proof.  We still need to get a glass top to cover it, but that was it!

The Tuesday before Christmas I went to Eden’s class to help with a Christmas party.  I was in charge of the craft and this is what we did.  I searched online for ideas that didn’t include glue or paint since I didn’t want to deal with mess.  I liked the craft so much that I took all the extra supplies I had bought and made a bunch to hang from our kitchen lights that same day!  They’re still up and probably will be until I’m sick of winter.

Unfortunately I don’t remember where I got the idea, it wasn’t my own.  But you take 2 pipe cleaners, mine were silver, and cut them in half.  Twist them around in the middle and make the general snowflake shape.  Then I put clear plastic beads of varying shapes and sizes on the pipe cleaners.  I would have used fishing line to hang them, but for the life of me, couldn’t remember where I had put it!  So I used white thread instead.  Thanks to Paul for hanging them (we have really high ceilings).

Happy Winter!