Last year my mother got me a fabulous coffee table for my birthday from this great little antiques/consignment store in town. At first I had really wanted to decoupage it. Glueing stuff to stuff has always been one of my favorite hobbies. I think at one point every piece of furniture in my house was covered with national geographic pictures and bottle caps. For whatever reason I haven't had a ton or great luck with decoupaged coffee tables and kids though. Over time they spill water or other miscellaneous liquids on top of the surface and the glue starts to peel, or if we aren't running the A/C at times it gets too hot and stuff will actually stick to the glue. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...who knows. I held onto this coffee table for over a year, just kind of eyeing it. I finally decided painting it was what I wanted to do. Initially I had imagined it multicolored, as I had a ton of different paint colors sitting out in the shed....but I ended up with this, and I'm pretty excited about it.
This is what I started with. It was actually pretty cool exactly like it was, but I have been in the mood to paint, and it was a blank canvas that I was just staring at.
On day one I just painted that whole thing a solid color. I had some help from the friendly animals outside, which resulted in having to do an extra coat. I decided to leave the legs natural, and I'm glad that I did.
The next step was making a stencil. I folded a piece of paper in half and then in half again, then cut out the shape. I hope that you all can pretty much see what I did from looking at this picture, because actually explaining it is way beyond me at this moment. I had to do this a few times to get the shape exactly what I wanted it to look like. I spent some time looking at designs online. There are tons of great DIY tips on blogs that I found by searching DIY stencil on Pinterest.
This part wasn't an exact science. I basically just laid the stencil on the surface and traced around it with a pencil, and then moved it and traced again. Pretty easy. I just eyeballed where I needed to place the stencil each time. I started in the middle and then worked my way to the edges. That way the pattern in the center would be complete and not broken.
Next, I filled in the lines with my contrast color. It looks white, but it is actually a fantastic color called Pirate's Cove or something. On a wall it sometimes looks blue, sometimes green, and occasionally grey. I needed to do two coats, as you can see from the picture above.
It took me a day or two to definitely decide that I wanted the bottom tier to have a chevron pattern as opposed to a striped pattern. In fact I started to do a purple and green chevron pattern, but like I said as I kept working I just stuck with these two colors. For whatever reason they really spoke to me. Or I could have just been too lazy to go shake the other paint cans.
I would like to say that I spent a lot of time being super meticulous and making sure that my chevron pattern was perfectly laid out in some scientifically verified method, but that would have taken too much effort. Rather I opted to cut 6 inch pieces of Frog Tape and then just try to line them up on top of each other. I did use a small ruler to sort of measure how far away I put each row of tape from the previous row. If you spent a long time looking at the table you could tell the it was not an exact science, but really it looks pretty nice the way it is.
Lastly I painted over all the tape and the bottom tier, waited for the paint to dry (well I'm going to tell you guys that I did, but really I waited like thirty minutes and then ripped it all off.) and took pictures of the finished product.
Now I'm as excited as I was when I got this piece as a birthday present. Thanks Mama!
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