Stuck In The Middle

It's FRIDAY!!!

And since this week was pretty  much all about Jimmy Fallon taking over The Tonight Show (at least in our house it was) what other way to celebrate than by re-watching THIS GEM of a video! 

Steven and Jimmy make everything better, it's a fact. 

Ok, on to the original point of this post. 

Lately I've been stuck. Stuck between about four different projects that I want to share SOOO BAD, but can't really because none of them are complete. I usually like to wait to have the whole "process" shown with astonishing  slightly-impressive before and after photos. I don't know, maybe none of you guys really care about the process, and that is more my OCD of wanting a "tadaa!" moment at the end to blame. Either way, this past week Eric and I have been working on a few things, and even though none of them are completely finished, I still want to share! 

First up is the set of The Little Mermaid Jr. for the Coldwater Middle School musical. We were approached to help design/construct the set a few months ago, and being the Disney princess addict that I am, instantly said "Of course we'll help!!!". 

Six boards of foam-core, a jigsaw, a lot of shop-vac action, some metallic paint, and vuala! we have coral. 

We also worked on these seahorse doors, which where a bit more meticulous than the coral, but overall I think they turned out great! 

We're planning to finish the rest of the set next weekend, I can't wait to see it all set up during the show!  

The performances are March 7th & 8th at 7:00pm, and March 9th at 2:00om in the Coldwater Auditeria. If you're in the area I highly suggest going, there are some seriously talented kids that will be performing. 

The second project I have going on is transforming this lamp from Goodwill...

...to look like this lamp I found on Pinterest. 

I've gotten through most of the painting, and once everything is dry I can move onto the gold-leaf details. I've never used gold-leaf before, but have read enough tutorials and it seems pretty easy. I love the splattered look this particular lamp has, and there is this lampshade at Target that I want to get to accent the gold.

First a few coats of primer, then about three coats of white spray paint with light sanding in between. I didn't take a picture after the white paint (guess I just forgot) but don't worry, you can't see the floral pattern peaking through anymore. 

After the white was dry, I wrapped the middle section with a few Kroger bags so I could paint the bottom and top parts gold. 

If you look closely, there is some weird texture action happening on the base. Honestly, I have no idea what is going on there. That appeared after my first coat of gold paint, and I can't think of why it's happening. I primed and painted that piece without any sort of previous reaction, so why would the gold go nuts on me? 

My only thought is that this actually did happen with the primer and white paint as well, but because they had a flat finish it wasn't noticeable until I hit it with the super shiny gold finish. 

I sanded it down, gave it another coat of gold, and it had the same reaction. What I don't understand is why it's only happening on one side of the base, if it was some strange paint-layering-issue shouldn't it be over the entire piece? 

Any paint experts have some advise? As of now my solution is to just face that side towards the back. 

Genius, I know.  

So that's the low-down on the Wellman house lately. We did get some fabric samples in the mail, so I hung them up with bobby-pins to see how they looked. I'm still waiting on one more sample, and then hopefully we can make a choice. 

Stay tuned for the "We finally finished stuff!" post. 

Anyone else out there in the middle of more than one project? I'd love to hear about them :)