sewing table redo

As you know I've been doing the crafting competition over at Just Between Friends. No lie, it's been a little stressful but also a fun way to get my crafting groove back after losing it when Phoebe came along. Here's the write-up I did for the sewing table along with some more information.

When I first opened the box and saw the Cricut Iron-on I had a moment of panic. I do not have a Cricut or other fancy cutting machine. I do have one nice pair of scissors and an x-acto knife. 

When I can find it. 

But since I have the scissoring skills of an angry third grader I knew I wasn't going to be able to do an intricate design.  As I was brainstorming I looked around my house and saw an old sewing table that my neighbor gave me about six months ago. 

I had been thinking of painting it, staining it, trashing it (?), but had done nothing so it sat in the corner collecting dust and preschool projects. Light bulb. I'd been wanting to paint it for awhile now but just couldn't find the motivation to get going on it, plus I wasn't sure what color to do. The nice (and scary) thing about having to do a project in 4 days is that you don't get time to be wishy washy about design decisions. You pick something and you go with it.

So I chose Benjamin Moore's Coral Gables because I had seen it in a few other tutorials and because I have coral pillows on my bed that I love. 

If you're looking to redo a piece of furniture I would recommend googling it before asking me because I still don't have a very good idea of how to do it. I'm probably not one to give advice at this point, although I will say that you should just make sure you have a nice smooth surface to paint on, which would probably require some sanding, and that you use a good primer. I used KILZ spray primer and it worked for me although I had to sand the grittiness away after priming. So I probably did it wrong. 

I used a combination of a brush and roller to get all my paint on and the guy at the paint store recommended that to help the paint cure faster I should take a blow drier to it after 24 hours. I did not. Probably a good idea though because if you set anything on latex paint before it's fully cured it'll dent. 

I discovered as I was going through the refinishing process that the 70s style sewing machine that this table was made for was a far different shape than my machine. It won't ever fit. So in the future I’ll just put my machine on top of the table when I’m sewing and use the inside to store fabric scraps. I took out some of the hardware inside then sanded and painted the wood to give myself a nice little shelf for storage. I may change the function of this shelf when I have a chance to really use the table but it works for now.

Finally, for the perfect touch of bling? The glittery iron-on film which I ironed on to my fabric before Mod Podging it to the front of the table. I printed off “sew.” from my computer, cut the letters out of paper, traced them onto the film, and then cut them out with scissors. 

In retrospect I probably should have written “sew what?” since it represents my general attitude towards sewing and my disregard for half the instructions that come with every project. I’m sort of a rebel. A rebel who likes puns and has crookedly sewn curtains.