Skip to main content

Upcycling Twilight

When she was a tween my favorite person fell in love with Twilight, so I pre-read the first two books in the series so I could see if they were age-appropriate for her (and they were.) We actually raced to get a copy of the final novel while we were on vacation, which made her very happy. Then followed a few years where she and her friends completely obsessed over the movies.

Anyway, I am not a fan of this series or any sort of YA myself, but anything Twilight-related brings back some lovely memories for me. When I saw two sets of the themed journals in tins go up for auction, I decided to bid on them, and won.

Here are the two sets of journals when they arrived, unpacked. The journals themselves are all in pristine condition and need no upcycling, although I may make fabric covers for them. The tins were in slightly rough shape, so I decided to rehab them.

I decided to use a metallic silver spray Rust-oleum suitable for metal to paint the tins.

First I sanded them, and then I took them outside to spray paint them.

It took a couple of coats to cover up all the damage and make the tins look like new again.

Here they are. One turned out a little better than the other, so I may do more with the lesser of the two. For now I'm happy with how I was able to rehab them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gifts

This is a story that starts out very sadly, so if you're depressed by the holidays you might want to skip the first part. As far back as I can remember I've dreaded the holidays. Being poor, having constant family troubles and belonging to a strict religion made that time of year always pretty unhappy. I just hunkered down and hoped to get through without being yelled at or punished because I didn't do something I was expected to do, like sit in church for hours without moving or making a sound while a priest spoke mass in Latin. Gifts were uniformly disappointing, too. My mother usually gave me dolls or socks or underwear for Christmas. I understand now as an adult that she was doing the best she could, and trying to save money at the same time, but as a kid I'd been told good children got what they wanted for Christmas. I was a pretty good kid, but while my friends received new bikes and cool toys and lots of treats from Santa, I didn't. I thought San

We Have Backsplash!

Yesterday my guy and I decided to chose this natural stone as the backsplash tiles for our new kitchen counters (which will be in the same quartz I'm holding at the bottom of the photo.) Since all the bids for installing the backsplash came in very high my guy is going to put it in himself; he's done a bit of tile work in the past, too. I swear there is nothing this guy can't do. :)

Detoxing Results

For twenty-four hours I left these five vintage cigar boxes sit with detoxing agents (baking soda, coffee grinds, dryer sheets, vinegar and Febreze) inside them to see which worked best to remove the tobacco/storage odors that came with them. I then removed the agents and did a sniff test. Before we get into the results, a reminder: none of what I do is ever meant to be expert advice, as I am certainly not an expert at anything. Follow my methods at your own risk, and please first consult an actual antique expert conservator or restorer to detox items that have value for you. Okay, let's see how my experiment worked. Baking soda (left) did nothing to remove the odors. I think if I let it sit for a longer period of time it might have done something, but for a 24-hour test it was a complete fail. Coffee grinds (right) removed 100% of the odors, and left behind definite coffee scent. I like that and think it goes very well with wood, but if you don't like the smel