We're going to redecorate the dining room soon. It will be a lot lighter in colour that it is currently, so I decided to give two of my favourite little pictures a makeover in advance. I bought these tiny photos over 10 years ago. I wanted to start collecting antique wedding photos. I couldn't find any but found these ladies in pretty dresses, so bought those instead.
I don't know anything about them, and the backs of them give few clues.
But I don't care. I just love them. ++** actually, since writing this post, I have googled the photographer, and found [This]. How lovely to have a name for the face in the photo!**++
Painting the frames (just inexpensive ones, they cost no more than £1 each), and changing the background paper has made such a difference. This is how they looked before.
The dark colours of frame and background were fine in the dining room, but painting them lighter will look much nicer on the paint colour we intend to have. At the weekend I started working on something. An eggbox!
It's just a bit of fun. My sister in law keeps chickens, so when I buy eggs each week, I save the boxes for her. I'm often lucky enough to have them returned, full of gorgeous Happy Eggs from her garden. After removing my eggs from the eggbox I usually put them in a bowl, but I wanted something smaller and safer for the eggs. My SIL has a little egg holder that one of her sons gave to her. I've always like it, it just looked like an egg box, but was ceramic. I've been unable to find anything similar, so I decided to make something myself.
I took air drying clay and an egg box and got to work. I rolled out the clay - not too thinly - and pushed into the egg box, then left to dry. It doesn't matter if the clay isn't perfectly smooth. Cardboard egg boxes are quite rough and bumpy, so it's fine if the clay is too.
I put it on a radiator overnight, to really make sure it was thoroughly dry.
Then, I carefully tore the cardboard eggbox from the underside of the clay eggbox. I took my tin of pink Plasti-Kote spray paint, and sprayed the eggbox inside and out. This was for two reasons. The first being to help seal the clay and prevent it going damp, and the second being that when the top coat of paint chipped, I'd see a little cheeky glimpse of pink underneath.
When the pink paint was dry, I painted the entire box in cream paint.
So now I have a clay eggbox! I'm not sure how long I'll use it for, I know I'll go back to using my bowl because it's pretty and I really like it, but for now it suits me well. It's quirky and fun, and keeps my eggs sitting nicely on the worktop.
It would be good fun for children to work on. Painted brightly, it would be perfect to hold small choccy eggs at Easter :o)Stay tuned. I have a little giveaway coming up soon!