Shall we wrap up the week with a easy but useful DIY? There are scores of small online stores that make nameplates. And then there are some of the brick-and-mortar stores I’ve featured in the past like Confluence which also specialise in this area. The ceramic ones are a rage all over and one can spot them in many malls, or you can make your won by buying just the individual letters in places like Mother Earth.

But, we wanted to make it ourselves and we did. Again on a Friday evening It took us about 2 hours to make it from scratch to finish. So, if you can spare two hours this weekend, you could make one too.

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One Friday afternoon, a few weeks ago, I hand painted one of our balcony walls. I actually wanted to stencil it but went freehand instead.

Not very good at sketching, this is how my effort turned out.

One evening last month, while searching for a sofa for our living room, I happened to go to the @ home store in Marathahalli with my son. When we moved from the Living section to the Bedroom section, his eyes caught a colorful red-and-orange colored bunker with a nice set of wheels and ladder. To be honest, even I loved it. He insisted on getting it home, and in the heat of the moment, I promised to paint his bed in the same color scheme. He immediately agreed and we got home. The episode was forgotten.

A week passed and I made no effort on keeping my promise (quite unlike me). He gently reminded me one afternoon after returning from school that his bed still had no wheels or, yellow and red color. It was time to get acting. I made a mental note to get the required colors before he got home the next day. And, so began the most ambitious DIY project of my life…

It’s  rubber-wood bunker with rails on either side.  It is over a  year old and I had picked it up from Oak n Oak for Rs.16,000.  This is the upper portion of the bunker before I started in all its ruggedness…

Without any doubt, the most laborious part of painting. Sanding followed by priming. I learned the hard way that if you don’t get this right, your project is doomed no matter how hard you try.

Seeing the yellows and reds after I painted the first part gave me a huge thrill of having achieved some thing. The finish was silky smooth. It gave me the confidence to paint the rest.

And here, I’m done. The bed rests in its almost final setting.

The lower part of the bunker is still waiting to be painted. I hope to get back to it in early December. Maybe, I will also add some fun elements to the headboard like a wheel or Winnie the Pooh.

Cost of the project: Rs.1200
Time spent : 6 hours
The look on my son’s face : priceless.

I’ll post a step-by-step procedure tomorrow on how to paint any furniture in the color you like.

Do we have any diligent readers (read: obsessively checking Google Reader for new posts) of Apartment Therapy here? If yes, you would know that a good chunk of posts are about restoring or transforming old furniture through painting and replacing the hardware. Images of antique, worn wooden cabinet/dresser/table painted into white or turquoise blue are swimming in my head now.

For me, when it comes to home renovation,  there is nothing more satisfying than giving a face lift to old furniture. To discard the old and buy new stuff is easy work, don’t you think? There are a few odd pieces of furniture in every house such as a chair, cabinet, side table that look aged.  A polish or a new coat of paint will do them good. I want to get started off with a old cabinet first.  It’s about six years old and in good working condition. It has lost its sheen so I’m toying with the idea of retaining its natural finish with a coat of lacquer or doing something radical like painting it in a bold color combination of white-lime green or white-turquoise blue.

Wooden cabinet

I’ve been looking around for ideas and there are quite a few interesting ones that I would like to share.

For a ethnic, Indian theme, bright colors such as fuchsia, red or violet are a good choice to complete the look. However, if you have a monochromatic or minimalistic theme, a single of furniture in a dashing color will look out of place. In the picture below, for instance, Kishani Perera has used a good mix of ethnic elements like hand-carved open book case, painted trunk as center table, cradle-styled chairs, and printed cushions. All the accessories blend well with the bright orange colored walls.

Trunk in red

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I just realized that it’s been  while since I posted a DIY project here.  The store tours had kind of shifted my focus away from everything else. So, here’s a easy project you can try over the weekend.

One of the easiest ways to spruce up your kid’s room is to decorate it around their favorite cartoon characters. My three-year-old is very fond of the Disney character, Winne the Pooh and his buddies Tigger, Christopher Robin, Rabbit, Eeyore, Lumpy, Kanga, Roo and Piglet. But he is at such a age where his liking for the fantasy characters is short-lived. A while ago, he doted on Noddy, and around the second birthday, he was quite crazy about Barbie (if only, for a brief while like two hours during which he felt she wasn’t quite her kind of fun),  and now, it’s Winnie and Spiderman.  Winnie has being going steady for nearly a year going by the Pooh accessories we have at home now - wall stickers, piles of books, soft toy, a deck of fun cards, and a towel. Anyways, while I wanted to do up a wall of his room around Winnie, I didn’t want to put up a permanent theme on the walls by painting which would make it difficult to change.

So, I got started on a acrylic on canvas portrait of Winnie The Pooh.  It took me about three hours t finish the project from start to finish, including shopping for materials.

Winnie The Pooh

What you’ll need:

1. Canvas

2. Acrylic paints

3. Tracing paper

4. 4-5 sheets Carbon paper

5. Paint brushes and palette

6. Self-sticking tape

7. Hooks

8. Varnish

Total Cost of the Project:

Under Rs.300

How to paint:

1. If you’re good at freehand, then draw the character directly on canvas. But if you’re like me who needs help with drawing, you’ll first have to find a picture large enough of the cartoon character. Look around for posters or stickers in stationery shops. Or if there’s a real nice picture of a smaller dimension, enlarge it on your computer and print it out.

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Are you constantly looking for ideas to spruce up your walls? Adding accessories to a wall, re-painting walls with themes, or hanging murals/artwork are some of the easiest ways to change the look of a room. My parents sent me two boxes of DIY wall art stickers in white and green colors. These are wood-based, primed decal like stickers that can glued on to a wall using any adhesive. I was contemplating where to put them up as the floral leaves would have been a perfect fit for the balcony, the space I love the most, but the hard exterior finish of the walls made it difficult to stick them on. So, I chose a bedroom wall instead.

3-D Wall Sticker

Pattern - 1

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Hope you all had a good weekend. It was a busy, crafty weekend for us as my three-year-old son and I got into action. I had a set of six wooden coasters that badly needed some revamping. In the past, I’ve tried painting them with acrylic colors but the results were not satisfactory. I was wondering how to give them a face lift when an idea struck me. I noticed the tiny bottle of Modge-Podge lying ignored on the craft supplies rack; I’d picked it up from staples a month ago for another project.

Wooden coaster

Modge-Podge, and dozens of Femina and other home décor magazines collected over the years was enough to get us rolling and get our hands dirty for the decoupage project. Over the next two hours Sunday afternoon, I flipped through Femina/Elle cutting out interesting words and colorful pictures. Once I had enough, we started sticking them onto the coasters. And, this is what we made -

Decoupaged Coaster

It reads - “Life’s a journey. Some say you must never look back. Why not?”

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Hope you all had a great weekend. Friday evening, my toddler son and I weren’t quite in the mood to go to the park. I discovered a candle making kit earlier that evening while cleaning the loft in one of the boxes, and kept it down. The candle making starter kit from Fevicryl lay untouched for over three years; I had purchased it at Ozone in Pune for Rs.49. When my son asked me what it was, I said” We can make candles with this and light diyas for Deepavali.”

Running out of things to keep us entertained that evening, we both made a unanimous decision of making candles. And what fun it was. My little helper unpacked the small ingredients box, helped me take pictures, and got the kadai out. Most importantly, he kept the energy levels high with his enthusiasm for anything new; it was fun.

Scented Candle

Here I share with you how to make your own scented candles at home in 4 easy steps:

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All’s not been well here.  Over the past 10 days, the stubborn cold virus has been doing the rounds with each of us taking ill in turns; the family is slowly limping back to normalcy. However, I did find sometime on those long afternoons (when not under the influence of cough syrup) to add some cheer and color to the home. Blame it on the festive season

A while ago, I wrote about two terracotta pots I picked on the roadside, one of which I painted with zebra stripes. The other one has got a fresh lease of life too. The tree is inspired by a similar design on a Worli bedsheet.

Worli painting on a terracotta planter

Orange Pomander : During my recent trip to Trichy, I frequented a old books exhibition that had a HUGE collection of design and interior design books. One UK magazine that I grew fond of (can’t recollect the name) was about gardening and growing house plants; every issue was merely a few pages thick and I doubt if the magazine is still in circulation. An interesting and detailed article on how to make your own orange pomanders at home inspired me to try one at home. The one you see in the picture hasn’t yet dried.

Orange Pomander

And, finally another ivy in yet another recycled planter. The handi is from KC Das that originally contained mishti dahi. I didn’t want to throw it, so I cut a Bisleri bottle, filled with potting sand, and planted it with a small money plant.

Ivy in a handi

Got a rack full of old magazines some as old as 5 years? A Feb ‘05 Femina issue with useful kitchen tips or a Woman’s Era magazine from 2006 that carried some mouth-watering recipes for the festive season or some cool tips on how to get dressed for a party after work in a jiffy? Yes?  Then you’ve got company…I have saved tons of magazines just because one feature was good, or it had an odd tip on Page 53 on how to keep your coffee decoction fresh (I have this annoying habit of folding pages that I’d like to read again). These magazines lie untouched for years but I don’t feel like giving them away.

After all, there might be a way to put these to good use without letting them occupy useful rack space.

Use it as a stand to keep a vase on the top. Doesn’t it make for a colorful base.

Old magazines stacked to make a colorful stand

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