Turned to Design: Chevron Painted Clover Table

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. School has started up again, so I'll probably be posting less for the next 11 weeks while I'm studying lighting and AutoCADing away. But I do have a couple more projects from the Noah's ARC nursery to share with you. So up next is my chevron painted clover table...

Ok... so its not exactly chevron, but I wanted to create a pattern that mimicked the chevron stenciled wall, so it sort-of is... and that's what I'm gonna call it! So there!

Although I really love every project we did for the Noah's ARC nursery, this little clover side table was basically my baby. I even bid on it myself, but I guess someone wanted it even more because they outbid me in the last 30 minutes of the silent auction. So new clover table owner, whoever you are, I really hope you're loving her as much as I do. :) Here's a little tale for you of how she came to be...

I took it to my home, gave it a good cleaning, taped off all the brass, and primed it. As you can see, I didn't do a very good just sanding (really it needed stripper) which bit me in the ass later. But until I knew that, I continued along my merry way and we spray painted it green and let it dry with all the rest of the painted furniture.

Then I went to tape off my design and as I was adjusting the tape, much to my dismay, the paint started peeling off!

So I had to start over. This time I stripped the table with Citristrip first. When it was all stripped and sanded, we noticed this really pretty burled wood edge so we decided to tape it off keep the wood trim.

Then I mixed my paint colors...

I used the Sherwin Williams "Colonial Revival Sea Green" as the mid tone and mixed some white in for a lighter tone and added a darker paint (a sample of Benjamin More from Ace Hardware) for another dimension.

I also used caulking, which is a little painters trick I learned to make sure you get crisp lines. You simply run a light bead of caulking over your tape edge and then wipe it off with a damp cloth so its barely there. That seals your tape line down so paint doesn't seep underneath.

I taped off my design with frog tape using the tape width as a spacer and labeling "L," "M," and "D" to keep track of what color each line would be. Then I started painting...

Judging by the poor picture quality this was obviously a late night project. I spent a few evenings working on it, letting each coat dry for a day before painting the next. The left photo shows the first two coats (the medium base and dark coat) while the right shows all three coats before I took the border tape off.

To finish her off, I touched it up by hand and gave it a coat of wipe on poly/ Then, cleaned the brass legs with Brasso...