Monday, November 9, 2009

#98...beyond the bi-fold

bifold before
My friend Nancy, (whose bookcase was refurbished here) has boring bi-fold doors covering her bedroom closet. They function, so there is no reason to replace them, but I decided that I could give them a little facelift and some personality.

First, I painted them a light grey color. I used a Satin Enamel Latex paint, and applied it with a small foam roller.I decided that I wanted to paint some sort of subtle trellis design on the doors, and I did not want it to be a long stencilling project, or cost much, so using a bed quilt I have (that has a stitched trellis design) as inspiration, I decided to quickly make my my own stencil using poster board and an oval bowl from Nancy's china cabinet. I traced the bowl in a couple different patterns on gridded poster board, cut them out, and held them up to see what I liked.
Next, once the grey enamel was dry, I held my homemade stencil up on the doors and traced my pattern on lightly with a pencil. (It is hard to see my lines in the above photo, but they are there.) I wanted the doors to have a freehanded feel, so I did not worry too much about measuring or exactly centering my design, I simply eyed it as I went. It took me about 20 minutes to trace the whole design onto the four closet panels.
Once the design was traced on, I used white acrylic paint and and 1 inch wide artist's brush and I traced over my pencil with the paint. Once the paint was dry, I painted over the entire surface with Sherwin Williams Metallic Glaze to give it a shimmery, polished, more subtle look.

No comments: