Somewhere in Time Armoire August 25 2013, 0 Comments

I have been hunting on and off for an Armoire that had great lines AND would fit our flat screen TV. Most that I found on Kijiji were too small or plain.  Then one day on Facebook I saw an Armoire that Kathy from Karma Fine Furnishings had posted.  My first thought was "it's gonna be out of my budget"
I did a happy dance when I found out it was in my budget and that it came in two pieces cus I had no idea how we would move it if it was one piece.  The Armoire Gods were looking out for me, well and Kathy too since she negotiated a great price with the owner for me!

Here she is in her former glory ...


She has a patchwork like veneer which was starting to lift in a few areas.  I knew I wanted to use van Gogh embossing plaster on it so I wasn't concerned.
Our next challenge was coming up with a theme for the piece.  Overall we are trying to decorate our little bungalow with a Cottage/Beach feel.   So initially I was looking at embossing a pattern of Ornamental grasses (sea oats) on the front, then I considered butterflies with a motivational saying.  We kept coming back to the fact that it was a TV Armoire and we should give it a movie theme.  In addition to that the piece reminded us of one you might see in a hotel room so we started googling Movie and Hotel themes and one of our favourite movies "Somewhere in Time" came up.  Oh ya!  That's it!  Since this piece is for our personal use and not for sale we weren't worried about using graphics from the movie. 
This is the inspiration for one of stencil images.
I traced the image, rearranged it to fit one of the Armoire doors then I bridged it to create a stencil.
For the right hand door we decided to use a nostalgic logo for the Grand Hotel which is the setting for the movie.

I used an Ultra Cut stencil material which has a sticky back, I tend to use this for large embossing plaster projects and for one time use.
Then I applied the plaster, I learn from every project I do, we should have removed the doors first and worked on a horizontal surface.  It was a hot day so the plaster wanted to run a little when applied on a vertical surface.  No worries, all worked out OK.
Oh, did I mention that I painted the whole Armoire in van Gogh paint, the colour is Halo.
This is not the final colour but I wanted to distress through to white and wood in my final finish.
Above is the piece painted white, and the embossing plaster applied.


Here is a closer shot of the embossing plaster which shows the areas where the plaster ran a bit in the heat (see Elise's tear).  I gave the embossing plaster a light sand to remove any sharp points before painting over.
Here are the doors with one coat of paint over the plaster.
At this point I decided life would be a lot easier if the doors were removed for distressing and so I could paint the interior of the unit. This image above is after the piece is painted and distressed to show the embossed image.  BTW, this van Gogh colour is one of our Muddaritaville Signature colours called Beach Glass.  
This image shows the interior painted with van Gogh Revenge which is a gorgeous black.  I wanted the TV and components to blend into the background.  I cured the doors with Chalk so they could be used as Chalkboards for messages.  I did not apply any topcoat to the interior at all!  I might regret this in the component area as it might be harder to keep dust free (I'll let ya know)
Here's door #1 with a message. I think I'm going to invest in some Chalk Markers, I broke the chalk about 5 times drawing this little message and there was chalk dust everywhere!
According to Frank I should change the above message daily, yup, I'm right on that!
The doors don't stay open like this they fold right back but this gives you an idea of how the black interior works with the components.
To finish the piece I wet distressed to expose the white base coat, and some wood, then I applied van Gogh Cabinet Glaze.  I could leave it like this the Cabinet Glaze is suitable as a top coat.
I may work with the glaze a bit more and maybe apply wax too but for now I'm happy to live with it a while.  Heck, it only took 4 months to get it to this point!

Tada!


Thank you so much for stopping by!
JoJo 
I'll be partying over here this week