My Other Passion

Besides paper and ink, I love to refresh old furniture. I reworked my studio a few weeks ago and needed a piece for die cutting. I knew just the dimensions and configuration I needed and decided I'd wait until exactly the right piece came along. Which took about 2 weeks. GREAT!! Here's the one I found, a cherry sideboard.



I bought it a garage sale in a bundle, along with a sofa table and two side tables.






I've only finished one piece, the one I needed for die cutting. Sort of a Vagabond table. :-) Here's the final result, installed & ready to go:



Love it!! I've got a desk I need to complete before I can start working on these other three pieces. But summer is here and its so nice working on these out on the deck.
Reuse, recycle, repurpose. And make things pretty!!

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Wendy Vecchi Embossing Paste

I wanted to freshen up our front window at the shop and knew I wanted to make a sign. I wanted it to be sort of like a sign you'd find on a hiking trail, but with a message. We've got this B Line stamp in the store and thought it would be perfect. But how to create it?? Wendy Vecchi's Embossing Paste to the rescue!




I printed out the message on my computer, sizing the text to fit my sign post. Rick built this for me out of some reclaimed wood (he is the KING of reclaimed wood!) and it was just what I had pictured.




I cut the letters out and attached them to some vinyl flooring scraps I got at Lowe's. The picture above shows the print out in red and the letters I had cut out in black on the vinyl. The red means nothing, except that I had run out of black ink on my printer!








I used a hot knife and cut the letters out of the vinyl, creating a custom stencil. The vinyl flooring was perfect because it had a foam backing and was about 1/8" thick. I wanted an extra thick stencil for this project.




Using my palate knife, I applied this yummy stuff through the stencils onto the wooden sign. I colored some white paste with Vintage Photo Distress Reinker. Awesome. Because I laid down such a thick layer of Embossing Paste, I let it dry overnight. I'm sure it didn't take that long, but I wanted it to cure thoroughly.




So here's our window. It turned out really great with some other vintage hiking equipment. The first afternoon we had TWO different people come in and ask if they could buy the sign! Well, you could, except its PRICELESS!! Thanks, Wendy, this was just the thing for our message to our guests this year!
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Location:Custom Sign Making with Wendy's Embossing Paste