"Beachy" Framed Transfer

Oh man! Another week of not getting much done. This new 3 hour commute (1.5 each way) is killing me! And Tom has been really sick since Tuesday. Right now he's having trouble breathing deeply because his chest is so congested. So it's off to the doctor tomorrow. Enough is enough.

I did play around with my freezer paper transfers again today. If you remember, I had terrific success with transferring onto a painter's drop cloth.

This is what I made today.

Before I go any further I should show you my original plan and the total failure that was. I wanted to do a transfer onto burlap but it turns out that the weave was too loose.

You can kind of see the word "beach" but not much else is legible. So I went back to my trusty drop cloth.

I used the same method as before - first using spray adhesive to attach a piece of freezer paper to a plain piece of printer paper (waxy side out).  Then I created a graphic - in this case the phrase, "Life is better at the beach" - flipped it backwards, and printed it out on the freezer paper.  I forgot to mention last time that I used PicMonkey to create the text and to flip it - it's the simplest program I've found so far.

I dampened the drop cloth, placed the print out face down on the cloth and "burnished" the back of the paper with a spoon.  Yes, this time I actually made the trip downstairs to get a spoon instead of using whatever was handy.

I printed the words in a navy blue to give it a nautical feel. Once the cloth was dry I trimmed it to 8x10 and put it in a white frame. You can see that some of the letters bled a little as they dried but I think that makes it look a little more weathered.

I think I'm going to rub some brown stain into the grooves of the frame to age it as well. Right now it's a bit too shiny. We plan on re-doing the basement in beachy colours and this is going to hang there.

Side note - Sasha was completely freaked out by the starfish I used in the picture. I guess it smelled funny to her. She was barking at it and trying to challenge it to a fight. Crazy girl. Everyone knows you can't beat a starfish.

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I'm linking up here this week!