Stripes~Painting them on furniture!

My hilarious and sweet blogger friend painted stripes on her bedside chest.

Cindy (of Cindy's Fractured Fairy Tale) writes about how she did it on her blog,

and how seeing some stripes I painted her inspired her to go for it!

I LOVE how this came out~and wanted to dedicate a post to this idea

of adding stripes to a painted piece.  It's a nice way to set your pieces apart from

the rest of the standard paint jobs, and its pretty darn easy to do.

Is this not gorgeous? 

 She only did her drawer fronts by adding a mix of two colors of

Chalk Paint™ and then aged the color a bit with dark wax. 

Check out her method

and see it step by step and

 laugh your butt off along the way.

 This is a vanity I did using a soft two tone palette.

 I added a fun little stripe on the center drawer.

I did NOT use painters tape, but used a standard school house ruler

 and just lined off with pencil the stripes.

As you paint freehand you will start second guessing yourself~

'cause the lines will be wiggling a bit,

especially if you have to paint 

over any raised moldings, like I did here.

You can see that they are NOT PERFECT~

but that is the point I am trying to make.

Perfection is not the goal~its the pretty end result 

and as you will see it really looks 

fabulous when all was put together

 (and I stopped looking at it with microscopic vision).

I added a layer of Annie Sloan Craqueleur to 

give the striped drawer some crackly age,

then I finished it off with clear and dark wax.

Pretty stripes~!!

The funny thing (to me anyway) was that the lady who bought it 

asked me to paint over the stripes to plain Country Grey.....huh?

The part I liked best, she liked least!!

So its all personal taste I guess, and if you have read this far, 

I am guessing you are 

a person who would like stripes on a piece of furniture.

 This was the finished look.

 The stripes pulled together the two tone vanity in a cool way.

My latest project with stripes was this old music cabinet

 that I got at auction.  I loved the shape and the finish

was sorely lacking~but that is just one big green light

in the world of painted furniture!

 I started off by painting the entire thing Graphite and then some Antoinette.

For the doors I used some painters tape and lined off a striped detail....

but its too darn perfect for this piece, so I got out the

 sand paper and roughed up my lines and distressed it

and then painted over the striped areas with a little Pearl Plaster

 to add a bit of pearlized shine and to soften the striped edges.

Its now a shabby music cabinet/bar/gigantic jewelry chest 

or whatever you want it to be!

This shows the weathered striped doors with a ripped out piece of 

Annie's new black and white toile fabric that i decoupaged to the interior.

The inside is going to get painted too~so this is yet to be done, but as you 

can see I drafted a little inspiration about this project and logged it into

the Annie Sloan WORKBOOK (a personalized decorating journal).

If you start paying attention you will notice that

 stripes are not just found in blogland~

this image is from Traditional Home magazine December issue....

and it shows the TRENDY traditional styling 

that stripes can give a piece!

To read about these pieces see the links below:

Cindy's Pink and White Striped Dresser

Amy's Two tone Vanity with Striped Drawer

and ....one last thing...

if you haven't read my son Justin's new blog  

click below:

Brush and Pail