I Love Lucite

I love Lucite furniture. I love Lucite accessories. It's featured in magazines, catalogs, and decorating blogs everywhere. I would love to buy 4 of these chairs at IKEA for my kitchen table.


I also love these other Lucite lovelies....













Back in August, in my pre-blogging days, I was at a nearby consignment store where I sell stuff I don't need anymore (and look for more cool stuff) and I saw this really cool acrylic/lucite stool. It had a really ugly white vinyl cover on it. I had just inherited a staple gun (ok, about a year and a half before this post, but whatever, I hadn't used it yet) and I thought this would be the perfect time to try re-upholstery. I have about a million discontinued fabric swatches I kept from my old job that I needed a use for, so I ran home and started going through them. I finally chose a cheetah print fabric (I love animal prints in small doses) that I also have pillows made out of somewhere else in my house. I knew it was going to look awesome with the color scheme in the guest room and pretty much anywhere else I wanted to put it. Like I said, this was in my pre-blogging days, and I wasn't smart enough to take any before pictures. DUH. Turns out, it WAS easy enough, but the corners were really hard to figure out. I had to look up a tutorial on You Tube to figure out a way to make the corners look good. Anyways, here is the end result. I have to say I think it came out looking great, if I do say so myself....

Adventures in Spray Paint: Bookends Redo

Sometime ago, I was watching HGTV and saw some silver bookends with the lowercase letters a and z. I thought they were really cute. I wanted some. I researched some online, and the closest I came up with were these, from Barnes & Noble Home Collection. (Did you know there was a Barnes & Noble Home Collection? Neither did I. But now you do.)

They were nice. A little pricey, I thought. So I looked on ebay (I love ebay) and found these....which I recognized, because they came from a place I used to work! I knew they were cute, and also knew they were a good deal. I also knew I had some silver spray paint. So I bought them! Here they are before:

Cute, but I didn't want them to be hot pink. I found the spray paint. I used Krylon's Short Cuts, in Chrome #32.

As a side note, I had two cans. But they were both kind of old. And they didn't have as much in them as I thought. Also the nozzles kept clogging, which made it extremely difficult to apply the paint correctly. I wondered if I needed to sand, prime, and then paint these. Maybe a few coats of poly after to protect the finish? After considering this I decided that I would just try to paint right over the existing finish and see what happened. I already had the paint. So I got about two thirds of the way done....


and I ran out of paint. Of course! So then I had to run out and hope they still had the same color. (They did.) Whew! The brand new can had a brand new nozzle which worked MUCH better. So much so that I made a nice big SPLOTCH on the front of the "z" because I got too close to it while I was spraying. So for anyone who tries this, make sure you FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS and back up at least 12 inches! I tried to remedy this by blotting it on the newspaper and then re-spraying, but alas, you can still see it. Yes, I like to DIY, I didn't say I was GOOD at it. At least not all the time! Anyways, here is the end result (taken from far away enough that you can't see the splotch...I think)!


Yes, I know these are bookends. I like them displayed this way, without any books. More like decorative objects. Kind of like this:

Hey, I think those are the same bookends I saw at Barnes and Noble, now that I think about it!