Nella's Craft Corner!

It's finally finished and I couldn't be more proud. Of course there are no before pictures because I got too excited and started as soon as I could. Just picture this a sweet round little wooden table. With two little chairs. I actually used it when I was a kid, it got passed onto our cousins when we out grew it and landed back to my moms house for the grand kids. Imagine something similar to this:

I started thinking a couple of months ago how fun it would be to have a space just for Nella to be able to color. She could get into the chair herself, get her crayons herself and have at it. The idea developed from there. I had to have containers for the crayons and of course some where for her coloring books and papers.

So I turned to my faithful Pinterest. I searched for "craft corner" to see what other people had come up with, how they organized all the little stuff and kept it neat. What I liked best looked something like this:

 different ways to organize

 cute, small & contained

tin cans on towel rod with shower hook!

Now I do know that Nella is only 2 but it's something that will hopefully grow with her. Maybe even become a place for her to do homework. So this is what I came up with:

There it is in all it's glory. I absolutely loved how it turned out. It has everything I wanted. Sorry for the crappy pictures, it's just me and my cell phone over here! So let's take a peek shall we!

I started with the table and chairs. I wanted them to be fun, be bright, be inviting. I knew I wanted to paint them but like I said I wanted bright & fun. I wasn't sure how to achieve this with just paint, then it struck me, duh! Decoupage! Of course I googled that and found out you can really use anything and stick it on anything. I went with wrapping paper, I figured it would cover well and I wouldn't have to match anything up like you would with plain old paper because with wrapping paper you have a lot of surface area to work with. I tried to find something gender neutral just in case so I went with stripes. I read that you should have a base coat (of paint) before you start with the Mod Podge. I painted the whole thing white, primer first and just one coat of white paint. No clue what brand or how much because I found it in the basement. It did the job and I was satisfied. After waiting for that to dry I slapped on a coat of Mod Podge on the table. I tried putting a thin layer of Mod-Podge on the wrapping paper itself as well as the table because he guide I found said to do that. Well that didn't work for me, when I tried to smooth it out it ripped so I had to scrap the whole thing. So I tried again this time only putting a layer of Mod-Podge just on the table. Then I cut a huge piece of wrapping paper and pasted it on. You don't want it to be too big, but you do want it to hang off the edge, it's easier to trim later. While it's slightly wet take a piece of sand paper and go around the edges. That's how you get the excess off but still get a clean edge. I smoothed out the wrinkles as much as I could and layered more Mod-Podge on top of that. I did at least 4 coats, and I still need to do a clear coat but it's holding up well without it.

Next I moved onto the chairs. I thought having the top part and the seat of the chair covered in wrapping paper would be cute. I knew the top part would be hard because it's a curved edge. I tried cutting a piece and making slits down the whole thing so I could make it smooth. Long story short it just didn't work. At all. The Mod-[odge was drying to fast for me to get it to do what I wanted. It looked like a hot mess.

This is a view form the couch. I had to take a break for a couple of days because it was very frustrating. Even more frustrating once I realized it wasn't going to work it had already dried so I had to sit there and pick and sand and pick and sand it all off. Not my idea of a good time!

As you can see from the above pictures I had to paint it again. i tried to make it as smooth as possible so you couldn't tell the damage I had done. After just painting it white and leaving it alone I moved onto the seat of the chair. Again I cut out a piece of wrapping paper, although this time I trimmed it to fit exactly how I wanted it because I wasn't able to and didn't want sand it off this time. It would be impossible and ruin my paint job. So I trimmed it to the shape and size I wanted. Once that was done I traced that one for the other chair as well. Again I put a layer of Mod-Podge just on the chair and stuck the wrapping paper piece on. Smoothed all the wrinkles and bubbles out, then put a layer right on top.

This was it while the Mod-Podge was drying, it's beautiful. I love that it dries so clear!

Almost done! Nella couldn't wait though; she had to test it out and of course I let her. She waited very patiently while it dried.

As you can see the buckets are hung differently here than how they ended up. Once we got our fabric book shelf hung up everything was pretty crammed together so I had to move everything.