70s Reject or Current Hit? (Warning: Long post)

Good morning! (Make sure you go all the way to the bottom of this post to see the link I promised yesterday)

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law's craft room was finished.  She's so lucky and it's so beautiful.  I'm so happy for her!  When my niece forwarded pictures of her mom's room to me, I knew I wanted to make her something fun to hang in her new space.

I love all the projects I'm seeing on the web that start with thrift store finds.  So my project follows suit.

I also LOVE befores and afters.  Fat to thin, ratty yard to beautiful paradise, old house to wow house.

But if I were reading this post, I might feel a little jipped.  Because in my excitement and haste to create this project, I forgot to take a true before picture.  So sorry!

So here's the best "before" I have:

Okay.  If you look really close, you can see an unpainted raccoon peeking out of an old tree.  See it?  Imagine that brown you see pretty much made up the entire project.  A 70s paint by number that never got finished.  I'm not slamming paint by number.  I mean, I did my fair share of paint by number projects when I was a girl in the 70s, but seeing that body-less raccoon head kinda gave me the creeps.  But I did like the shape and structure of the frame so I snagged it.

First, I painted it using Krylon Green Apple spray paint. Such a pretty green!

After the frame was completely covered and dry, I went over it with Valspar Antiquing Glaze.  LOVE that stuff.

The frame had some awesome gouges and nicks that the glaze emphasized, giving it great character and interest.

After the frame was all ready to go, it was time to paper craft.  My favorite part!

Now.  At this point, I was pretty sure of the design of the project, but I wasn't sure what papers to use.  I had a scrapbook store trip planned, then as serendipity would have it, I got a call from cute Jenny at We R Memory Keepers!

She asked if I would be willing to do a non-baby project using their Baby Mine lines.  Of course, I said yes!  I just wasn't sure how I was going to take blue and pink baby products to create a craft room inspiration piece.

I think flowers belong in every craft room so I decided to go with that and make a little "scene".  I used different Big Shot dies and EK Success and Stampin' Up! punches and even was able to incorporate some of the Baby Mine chipboard elements to make these flowers super 3D.  Finally, I added a phrase with the Baby Mine chipboard letter stickers.  I really like that font.

So with all that said, here's the "after"! All the paper and chipboard you see is from the We R Baby Mine line.

See that blue chipboard piece?  In the center is a blue baby elephant.  I just covered it up and you'd never know it was meant for baby!

When I make a project for someone, I put my heart and soul into it and am crushed if they don't like it.  Fortunately, my SIL seemed to really like it and now it's hanging proudly in her new space!!!

We R seemed to really like it too, because it's on their FB page today!  I'd love for you to go check it out and if you like it, you could "LIKE" it! :)

Thanks for joining me at the Table today!