Kaetlyn’s Tiffany Blue Dresser

I love doing projects for others when I have the opportunity. So when my friend Kathy said she had an old dresser and mirror from her childhood that she wanted refreshed for her young daughter Kaetlyn, of course I said yes! Here it is in her previous 70′s/80′s glory:

I went over to see Kaetlyn’s room so I could figure out what color to paint it. She had this whole “riding stables” theme with bright pink, green and just a small hint of sky blue, so I decided to pull out the sky blue color so as to not overwhelm the room with pink or have a crazy bright green going on. Plus, I’ve always wanted to paint a dresser Tiffany blue.

First things first – the boring stuff. I removed the drawers and wiped everything down. I sanded the top a bit just to roughen up the laminate. Then I added a bit of white caulk to some of the seams on the sides of the dresser. It was a small detail, but it makes everything look more solid.

Next, I primed everything using two coats of Olympic no-VOC primer.

Now the fun begins! I painted it a soft, light blue (Surfer Wave in semi-gloss Olympic no-VOC from Lowe’s) with white trim. Choosing my paint color is never an easy process (I don’t know how many times I’ve asked my husband which color he likes more, only to have him tell me they look exactly the same.)

I also decided to keep the original handles and just gave them a fresh coat of spray primer and paint.

After lots of taping to get the nice, straight white accents, here is the finished product! 

I did put two coats of polycrylic over the entire dresser to give it that extra-durable finish (to hold up against wear and tear). This is probably the most intricate painting I’ve done on a piece of furniture, but it turned out so sweet and it looks adorable in Kaetlyn’s room!

 

Thank you, Kathy and Kaetlyn for letting me have some fun with this project!

If you noticed the wall of bows on the wall, they are handmade by Kathy! If you’re interested in seeing more, just shoot me a message (rixenitup@gmail.com) and I’ll put you in contact with her. 

Easy Footstool Update

My aunt, Joellyn, had a couple of old footstools that were pretty worse for wear. She asked me if I could recover them for her, and I said, “Of course,” of course!

You can see in the photo above that they were not only faded, but there were holes in the larger one! It was definitely time to give them some new life. First things first, of course – the dirty work. I had to rip off the covers and the padding on both stools and get all the way down to the bare bones. Here’s what I was left with:

Joellyn basically told me I could cover them in whatever fabric I wanted – yikes! I was a bit paralyzed by all the fabric options, but I finally settled on this rust, gray and brown fabric that had just enough of a pattern to make me happy.

You can see in the photo below (as I was deconstructing) that the larger stool had a sort of cover for the rough edges on the underside. I knew I wanted to do the same thing with the new covering, but the fabric was over $20/yard (even on sale – eek!), so I kept the yardage down by purchasing a less expensive dark brown for the underside.

Next, I cut my batting. I used two layers the exact size of the top, then a third layer to wrap around the edges and attach on the bottom. This worked really well because I wanted the top to have a bit of cushion, but three layers wrapped around the edge creates way too much bulk.

I stapled it and trimmed the edges.  

Next, I stretched the fabric over the top and stapled that about an inch and a half from the edge (so the brown would cover those staples).

Again, I trimmed the edges of the fabric: 

Looks pretty straight to me so far. I did have to pull out about half the staples and adjust it at one point, so that wasn’t awesome. It’s harder than it looks to get it straight!

Next, I used the old underside cover as a template to cut the brown fabric. I was planning to fold the rough edges under, so I cut about an inch larger than what would be the final size:

I didn’t do exact measuring at this point. I just folded the fabric under as I went along, stapling the four edges first.

The white marks showed where I needed to screw in the plates again. The staples don’t look so great, but they were actually temporary.

I used black tacks and added one about every one inch (so many tacks!) then removed the staples.

I did pretty much the same thing with the smaller stool, but the legs weren’t removable so I ended up simply folding it under and stapling the edges (the old fabric was attached this way, as well).

Here’s a reminder of how they looked before (so you don’t have to scroll back up):

The finished products! Well Jo, this is the first time you’ll be seeing your new (old) footstools…what do you think?