Bon Appetit

Have you ever looked at something you have had around the house for a very long time, whether it's a nick-nack or piece of furniture, and said to yourself "time for a change!"?  I have this plate and stand set.  The plate itself is plastic with a painted apple on it.  Cute, but dated.  I had it on top of a cupboard in our current kitchen, tucked in a corner, and I barely noticed it half the time.  I bought it online from Terry's Village (they are not around anymore, but I loved this store!) with a bunch of other cute nick-nacks about 15 years ago.  We had just moved into our brand new house and it was looking a little naked.  Terry's Village had a great clearance sale with lots of cute stuff, so I ordered a bunch of stuff to fill in the nooks and crannies of our new house.  I loved it all!  But, when I looked up to this plate last week, I thought it was the perfect canvas for a Chalk Couture project.

Let's chalk!

Well, here it is.  It was very cute, but like I said, dated.

The apple and decorations were hand-painted and some of the paint was raised and left texture marks that would stand out after I painted it.

So, I grabbed some fine sandpaper and gave it a good once over to take the paint down and remove the texture.

There, much better.  A little worse for wear looking, but it's smooth and ready for paint!

I used this chalkboard paint I found at Walmart and gave the plate a couple coats, front and back.  This gave the plate a good surface for the Chalk Couture transfers to adhere to without sticking too much.  Some glossy paints stick to the adhesive on the transfer and will ruin it.  You don't want that!

It was smoking hot out that day, so it didn't take very long for the paint to dry.  The instructions on the paint can say that it is fully cured overnight, but I'm pretty sure the 95°F heat sped that up!

I cut apart the transfer and went to work!  Here is the link to the Bon Appetit transfer at my store if you are wanting to do a project with it!

I took my time and cleaned the leaf transfers in between chalk paste colors.  Doing that let the colors dry before I overlaid it with another.

I added the olives around the leaves.  Each time I used the transfer, it left a different chalk impression and didn't look so perfect.

I did the first layer of the Bon Appetit transfer in a light grey color.  Then I cleaned up the transfer, dried it and applied it again, offset just a bit, and used the white paste.  This technique gave it a cute shadowed effect.  I only had a glossy sealant on hand to put overtop the chalk, but I think it still turned out great!  Matte or glossy, chalk paste projects look beautiful either way!

I found these cute utensil drawer pulls online and used some E6000 to adhere them to the plate.  This stuff is really stinky and needs to set up overnight.  I made the mistake of standing up the plate too early and the fork and knife started to slide down.  Yikes, that could have been bad!

Well, I am thoroughly impressed on how this project turned out!  The light yellow chalk I used matched the stand perfectly!  I love it when a plan (eventually) comes together!

                          

                 

Thanks for stopping by!