Pretty in Pink

Before:

This little lady came to me from some neighbors who moved into a fully furnished house, but wanted to have their own furnishings. They were about to put it on the curb, but their daughter, who goes to church with me, remembered that I like to refinish furniture, so she messaged me to see if I’d want it. I had a pretty full garage at the time, but how could I pass up this free little cutie?!

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with her, and she needed a drawer glide fixed, so she went on the back burner for a while, which is to say, the back wall of the garage.

Then I finally decided I wanted to get her out of the garage and try out Dixie Belle’s Tea Rose, a cute, dusty pink.

I scuff-sanded it, and then decided to do the sides in fluff. At this point, I decided to make my life complicated–I mean, learn a new skill–blending.

I had seen a video about a week before about how to blend, and it looked doable, and the piece turned out so cute. So I tried it….

YIKES!!

I came back and made it a little better later, but I still didn’t like the look.

It looked like I just slapped some white randomly in the middle of the drawers. Eww. So I decided to do some research. I looked up another blending video from one of my favorite furniture artists, Brandy Kollenborn from Brushed by Brandy. She is the blending queen! And she made it look sooo easy. Here’s a link to the video I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV_UBKf8rHg

She’s amazing, right?

Here’s how it looked after I used her method:

So much better–more subtle, just a highlight in the middle of the drawer to add some depth.

I left the top the original wood color, initially, because I usually like the countryish look it adds to a piece, and I worry less about damage to the paint from things put on the top. However, once the paint was on the body, I hated the top.

I also added some disappearing stripes on the sides–another technique I learned from a fellow furniture artist from my favorite Dixie Belle Facebook group.

I used yellow 1 1/2 inch frog tape, spacing out the stripes evenly. I pretty much just eyeball the spacing so it looks right, but I do measure at the top and bottom with really long stripes like this, just to make sure they don’t end up diagonal. My mom introduced me to this Frog Tape, and it is a game-changer. It gave me great clean lines, and has ruined all other tape for me.

Once I had the lines taped on, I painted the Tea Rose on the middle of the stripes, and Fluff at the top and bottom, then blended them into each other, in a similar fashion as I did the drawers.

Then I applied this transfer from Redesign with Prima:

I love these Frenchy transfers, probably partially because I was a French nerd in school. The one above says, “A house is made of walls and beams, but a home is made with love and dreams.” Adorable, right? This one reminded me of another one I did this summer that was kind of my inspiration for this piece:

I love these Prima transfers. They are such an easy way to take a blank slate and add some drama!

Finishing Touches:

I also decided that the top of the dresser was a bit plain, so I decided to bling it up a bit. I tried casting some moulds with resin for the first time! I accidentally screwed up and got the resin with the 24-48 hour dry time instead of the 10-minute dry time. Just a small difference. This is the one I should’ve gotten (and eventually did order):

Here’s the mould (Thorton’s Medallion):

I just used some Elmer’s wood glue to stick them on there, but you could also use E6000, or most other multi-surface adhesives.

After it dried, I painted it with a coat of Fluff, but I decided that the Fluff was too white, on the whole top. I kinda wished I had used Drop Cloth or Sawmill Gravy, which are both more off-white than Fluff. So I decided to try some brown wax to darken it up. I used Dixie Belle’s Best Dang Wax in brown, and applied it with an old natural-bristle brush, since I didn’t have any fancy wax brushes. It has pretty stiff bristles for getting down in the crevices. Before I applied it, I put on a coat of Varathane water-based polyurethane, so that I could wipe back the wax and have better control of how much was on there.

But When I added the wax, I found some places where the poly had dripped off the mould and dried. GRR.

So, I figured I’d have to sand off the bumps and do the whole process over again, but when I sanded back, I kept sanding the whole top, and it ended up leaving the wax only on the grain of the top, and it looked so cool! It was a happy little accident, as Bob Ross would say.

After:

Here’s how it turned out! I added some new clear knobs that are a bit more feminine to match the new style.

Let me know what you think!

It is for sale! $200, and she’s yours!

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