Living Room Updates
12 hours...12. Thats how long my last project took. 12 hours of waddling up and down the stirs to my laundryroom, occasionally running. The running part is probably not the wisest decision this 7 months pregnant woman has made. The istructions tell me that i need to allow the dying process to happen for about one hour. the only problem is that my washing machine does not have a time preset and the longest the machine will run before draing in 15 minutes.
I was getting pretty sick of all the beige in my living room. The walls, the floors, the couches, even my coffee table. It's all some shade of beige.. or it was, I should say. I decided to take on the task of dying my ektorp couch and loveseat. How hard could it be? I went online, purchased iDye from amazon, patiently waited a week for my package, and angrily returned the package when I realized I bought the wrong type of dye for my fabric. I then found a store in Toronto that sells idye (which is supposed to be a really good dye brand). I am never in Toronto, but luckily I have frieds who are there plety and some who live there, so hooray for free shipping!
Anyways, I decided yesterday, so not that long ago, that I would attempt this project. Luckily for me, not my husband though, he was not feeling well and had to be picked up from work so he could kind of entertain our 2 year old son, or at least make sure he wasnt climbing up my kitchen cabinets again.
I started my project at 10 am, filled my washing machine with water, salt and dye, added the first pile of couch covers and prayed. The results? Meh. They are okay. You see flaws when you are close, Of course i see them all the time but I now have "silver-grey" couches. though I would say its more ash/charcoal grey, but thats probably because they were beige before and not white. It's a nice change either way.
If you plan on taking on this project, I suggest you use more dye packs than the instructions, in my case, I used 5 packets for my three seater and I probably should have used atleast 7.
Just prior to dying my couches, I refinished my coffee table. I bought this table something like 4 years ago. I blogged about it on my previous blogging site. It's a very solid beautiful coffee table and it took me the last 4 years to work up the courage to refinish it, only because I really liked my table and I was woorried I would ruin it.
well it turns out I didn't ruin it. I dragged the table outside and down my porxh steps all by my preggo self, and began sanding it down. no turning back now. I made sure to get as much of the laquer off as I could and then began painting it, first the legs, then the base. Then I stood back and I liked what I saw, it's similar to my kitchen table, with the two toned paint/ wood colour, but I wasn't sure if it would too much to have two tables like that. Part of me wanted to go all white, which was the original intention, so I quickly sent a pic to a facebook friend who happens to be an interior designer with great taste. She informed me that the table would look great either way but that the two toned is slowly making an exit from current trends. That was enough to put me back on my track. I took out the paint brush, and painted the rest, took my sander to it again to weather it and transfered a country chic image to it.
How to transfer and image onto wood:
There are many ways to transfer an image. This is how I do it: use an image printed with inkjet printers (though I feel like regular printers might be able to work too). add a thin layer of paint to the surface and before the paint dries, lay the image face down in the paint and rub the back of the paper with a smooth object such as a spoon. I used a little tykes chistle that I borrowed from my son's tool box. allow the paint to dry with the paper ontop. 0nce the paint is dry, wet the paper with a cloth and carefully begin rubbing the paper with your fingers until the papers is gone and you should be left with just the image.
Above you will see the livingroom transformation. The couches dyed and the coffee table has been refinished.
Below are some pictures of the work in progress including my little helper who brought out his toy sander and sanded along with me!
