Alice’s Bar Cart

After missing my peeps in the WordPress world and giving the own domain thing a whirl, I decided I am not the girl who wants to work the amount of work it takes to run my own kingdom. I have come back to the fold, people. I may change the theme in a bit, so you don’t have to scroll through every cotton pickin’ thing I ever did, unless you are so inclined to do so, that is.

So enough about that, lets get on with a project, shall we?

As you can see above is a sweet little bar cart. Daughter #2 loves Alice in Wonderland, and I love daughter #2, so for part of her Christmas gift, I nabbed this baby for $15.00 at my local thrift store.

I started out with an entirely different plan originally. She has some beached wood accents here and there in her apartment, so I thought I could work with the “wood grain” of the original without showing too much of it’s fakeness and still be too cool for school.

 The two panels come off to be painted. I masked off what I wanted to stay “wood grain” with some left over vinyl dots from my bathroom project, like so.

    

Heres where it stopped working, and even though I fully expected it to not work (and I’ll explain in a minute), I went ahead anyway.  When you mask off a line, dot, squiggle, whatever, and you paint over that, you need to remove the masky bits before the paint dries or you get what happened here below. Problem was, I needed to prime the plastic-y finish of the “wood grain” or the paint would be easily scratched off.  Instead of painting the primer, peeling, reapplying dots and painting the white gloss paint, I got lazy and let the primer dry, painted the gloss and peeled off the dots. And so before you feel sorry for me, know I brought it on myself. 😦  Sigh.

    

So I repainted the panels and went with what I used to do all the time.  The art of Trompe’ L’oeil, or as we say in English speak, To Fool The Eye.  With shading you can make things look 3d.  Because it was a bar cart (but could be used for a billion things) I wanted it somewhat food/drink related.  I went with the fun bit Alice goes through with the Eat Me and Drink Me stuff.

I painted a fake doiley with one corner folded up for extra trickery.  The teal plate matches her sofa and the pink donut is because, well, who doesn’t love to eat pink donuts?

And there you have it.  She wasn’t sure she would find a good spot for it in her apartment, and I said I would sell it on Ebay if she didn’t. but she was able to pop it in a perfect little nook.  Dang! Now I don’t have anything to sell on Ebay.  Maybe I need to stop giving stuff away.  On to the next thing!

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