Wednesday, March 12, 2014

From fail to...slight less...fail-y....I dunno, these puns don't write themselves, you guys.

     So remember when I re-did that lap desk? Yeah that turned out to be a total failure. It sucked the first time around anyway because of that whole thing where I had forgotten why I freaking hate Mod Podge so much, but even after I finally thought I had it done with spray adhesive and clear lacquer, it ended up not working out. 

Booo, hissss.
     As I had feared, the paper pulled up on the edges and got torn up. Luckily I had a backup plan. See, it had occurred to me about an hour after I finished, as ideas tend to do, that if I was going to go with white and gold stripes, why didn't I just paint the damn thing in the first place? But at that point it was too late. 

     Which brings us to me tearing off that paper in big, satisfying chunks. I thought it would be miserable to scrape it all off, but it was actually alarmingly easy. But once it was all gone, there was this...


     The spray adhesive had left a sticky lumpy mess behind that I couldn't just paint over, so I took some sandpaper to it. Once that was done, I took some white spray paint to it...


     ...which was HORRIBLE AND PATCHY AND MADE ME FEEL SCREECHY AND THE SCREECHING ALARMED THE DOGS. I seriously had a rage meltdown at this stupid spray paint. It sucked so bad. I kept doing nice thin coast like good spraypainters are supposed to, and it just...never got any better. Once I'd done a truly stupid number of coats and it dried it didn't look quite as terrible, but I still glowered at it for a while before deciding if I even wanted to keep going. I was at a point where I'd put so much work into this stupid lap desk and it still looked like crap, so I kind of felt like I should just trash it and go buy a new one somewhere. But I persevered! Mostly because if I hadn't I wouldn't have had anything to post about today. Except maybe "I tried to do a project but it sucked because I suck at everything DESPAAAAIR" and I feel like I do those posts pretty often as it is, so. Anyway.

     After I gave it a good long while to dry, I taped off some stripes with Frog tape, since that's supposed to be le so much better than regular painter's tape. I just eyeballed them, because that's how I roll. 



     Then I went to town with my gold spray paint and pulled the tape off as soon as I was finished. Well, technically I waited long enough for me to fumble around for the tape packaging and read through all the "don't eat this, you'll die" warnings to get to the directions and find out if I was supposed to wait or not. Then I pulled it off. It felt like an accomplishment that I didn't have any color bleed underneath. 


     The stripes ended up covering most of the lingering patchy weirdness, and once I coated it with clear lacquer and brought it into its habitat it didn't look messed up at all (high praise). 


     So I guess I'm...satisfied with it? It works, it looks nicer than its previous incarnations, and it shouldn't peel up or chip or anything strange like that, and at this point I'll take that as a win. I know, I know, I'm almost too inspirational: "DIY! Take a drab thing and turn it into something that you don't entirely despise!" 


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