Friday, March 16, 2012

my vain attempt to be martha.

A lot of you may have seen this chevron-printed butte on Pinterest recently.

Oh, Mrs. Stewart, you and your little DIY team have done it again. In their overwhelming brilliance, they took a cookie sheet and covered it in a chevron-print fabric to create this fabulous little tray (they even included step-by-step instructions to creating your own upholstered masterpiece). I knew that without a doubt, our humble abode NEEDED this tray. Like it really, really needed it.

But, as I started looking into fabric for my own tray, I was only finding options that were $14-18 per yard. Further, my tummy was beginning to churn with the knowledge that I have never been very handy with spray adhesive and fabric - I always end up with crooked fabric, bubbles of excessive glue, you get the picture. So I decided that my best bet was to paint myself a little tray. This had a couple of benefits:

A) I already had spray paint, painters tape, and acrylic paint in a color I was hearting.
2) I had a coupon to Bed Bath and Beyond which would allow me to buy my cookie sheet for $4.
C) $4 cost for painted tray < $20+ cost for fabric tray.

Done and done.

I picked up my cookie sheet, and got my tarp laid out.

I know we've only taken one step, but let's pause to chat. We all know that every cookie sheet on the market is non-stick. Awesome for Nestle, terrible for painting. In hindsight, I probably should have tried to sandpaper the cookie sheet to give the paint something to stick to, but I was just too excited to get painting! So after one coat of spray paint, I had a momentary panic attack because of my refusal to sandpaper, but I soldiered on.

After getting that initial coat of paint, each subsequent coat stuck easily and soon the white base coat was finished! When it was time for me to flip the cookie sheet over and paint the bottom of the pan white, I found I was out of spray paint. Not wanting productivity to conquer laziness, I decided to paint the bottom edge of the pan blue so I could avoid a trip to the store for more white paint. So I taped off the edges of the pan...

...so that I could paint the little lip of the pan and the bottom edge the same blue as my chevron stripes.

Once the bottom was painted, I was then ready to start on the chevron stripe. I started by taping off the first chevron pattern in the absolute center of the cookie sheet.

I then used the width of my painters tape as a guide for the space to leave between each stripe. I lined up a small bit of tape on each line of the chevron stripe, and then placed the larger strips of tape to create the next two chevron stripes.

I then removed my width-markers to judge if this technique was going to work.

So far so good! I continued using bits of painters tape to guide the placement of my larger strips of tape and soon finished taping off the entire cookie sheet.

I then applied two coats of the blue acrylic paint I used to paint the bottom edge of the pan.

And after setting it outside to dry for about an hour, I carefully peeled up all of the tape!

Not too bad! You can see that a bit of white base coat peeled up with the tape at the bottom of the cookie sheet. I touched-up that spot and a couple of other spots where the blue paint had seeped under the tape just with some white touch-up paint I had on hand.

Once the touch-up paint, had dried, I applied a coat of clear acrylic sealer to the top and bottom of the pan to make sure this lovely tray would last. I am absolutely thrilled with the result!

As I am a lover of all things coffee-related, I thought this could be the PERFECT tray for my coffee station! Not only will it corral any overflowing coffee mishaps, but it can also be easily toted into another room for a mobile coffee station if we wanted!

I love love love the little pop of color and spunk this tray brings into our kitchen! I think it really brightens up our fabulously high-quality laminate countertops. 

Have y'all tackled any DIY projects over your Spring Break? 

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