Furniture Makeover Series #1 - Simply Vintageous....by Suzan

Good morning everyone!  My name is Suzan and I'm a paintaholic and I blog over at  Simply Vintageous....by Suzan. So far so good - here we go I was thrilled when Danni asked me to do a 3 part series on painting furniture. OKAY - thrilled and a little nervous.  Why is it that something you do constantly and effortlessly suddenly becomes terrifying when someone actually asks you to POST on another blog about it? My posts are normally filled with tongue in cheek ( isms ) until someone actually asks me to post something funny - and then I think about it and think about it and the best I seem to come up with is " why did the chicken cross the rode ".  So when Danni said she was hoping I would do something with furniture ( something I do constantly ) I panicked and thought - Oh No, not furniture, what in the world can I possible come up with? And I thought about it and thought about it but no ideas appeared on the table. EUREKA!!!! That's it! I'll do table transformations................... I've been wanting to paint my dining room table for ages and ages now - hubby is standing firm against it. 
Suzan says - I think I'm going to have to paint the dining room table now 
John says - You are NOT painting the dining room table - why do we have to constantly have this conversation? 
Suzan says - I'm guest posting for Danni at the Inspiration Cafe - and she wants me to do a furniture post - and I have no furniture left to paint................. 
John says - What? 
Suzan says - I'm guest po 
John says - I heard you - it just doesn't make sense 
Suzan says - I NEED TO PAINT SOMETHING John says - It's the last thing of wood left in this house - you're NOT painting it 
Suzan says - Fine - I'll find something else................. 
We have a butcher block in our teeny little kitchen - where we have a lot of our meals - a few months back I decided to give it a " face lift " and ended up with this - you can read about the conversation that ensued from that HERE

John did NOT like it - so I decided to give it another face lift ( only for him, poor guy, because it's not fair to have to live with something you don't like ) -  and anyway the ugly truth is that " finish " was not meant for heavy usage and it ended up looking like this (these are not the photos we furniture people usually show lol)

So after John went to bed ( trust me, it's easiest that way ) I gave it a quick coat of Annie Sloan Old White

Btw - he's going to kill me tomorrow morning - so if I'm not here next week to do the next segment you'll all know what happened - pls notify the police.........................this does not have to end up in the cold case files at all.
Next I went to the Graphics Fairy ( actually I have a file on my desktop where I save all my favorite graphics for easy access - otherwise you can spend as much time on that site as you do on Pinterest ) and chose this

in honor of the Inspiration Cafe - because the image is too small for this project I went over to Block Posters a fabulous site where you can resize your images to suit your needs - in this case I resized it to cover 4 pages. You can take it from one page

to 2 pages

and so on - please note the pixels get a little distorted if you go too large - so the larger you go - you will have to paint in the tiny gaps.

Cut the edges of your papers until your images align perfectly - and tape the pages together ( avoid taping where the actual image is ) Now there are many ways to transfer graphics onto furniture - Some people simple reverse it and rub with a pencil until the transfer comes off lightly - they then fill it in with paint. Some people use Modge Podge - I'm ashamed to say that I've never tried this method - though I keep saying I'm going to try it, I've just never attempted it yet............... For this project I used Graphite Paper - This is the " graphite " side - gray - I had to back track this step because I forgot to take photos NOTE TO SELF: when you're doing a tutorial on a subject, take photos of every step please This is the graphite side - this is the side that has to be face down on the surface you are working on

then you place your image on top of it and simply TRACE the image. ( the above image is what the graphite paper looks like when your finished ) when you remove everything you're left with a " pencilled " copy of the image you can use paint to fill everything in at this point - I always use a sharpie pen because my hand is not steady enough to paint within the lines.....................

I added quite a few more leaves - and the words LES - and AU LAIT - because at 53 I still haven't learned the concept that " less is more " Don't worry if it's not perfect at this point - y ou can fix all that when it comes time to fill it in here's what it looked like after coloring everything in

A light sanding to distress the image

Wonder what John will say? I know if I plunk down bacon and eggs tomorrow morning - it could say Cafe au Poo Poo and he'll be fine with it - just don't know if I can get up early enough to do that!!! This was so much fun ladies - I adore you all - and love your blogs - and am completely honored that you would even consider asking me to guest post!!! Now excuse me while I make a cup of tea -

and ponder what to come up with for next week's installment at the

much love