Messy Mugs

I like coffee. It's my favorite. It keeps me awake and alert. It's good for reading and time with friends and rainy days and sunny mornings and Saturday morning cartoons and road trips....

SusanNewberryDesigns

Ahem. I digress.

When people know that you like coffee, you tend to be given coffee related items. It's been years since there has been a birthday or Christmas without at least one mug hidden under the wrapping paper. Which leads to this:

Mountains of mugs. It was becoming dangerous to open the cabinet door.

After consulting with the fellow decision-makers of the home (mom and dad), we settled on a peg board with hooks. No ordinary pegboard would do, of course. We had some left over medium blue paint in the basement that dad used for the base coat. I went to Lowe's and bought light blue and bright green paint samples.

I wanted a floral design, so I created a stencil using a plastic 2 pocket folder (I got mine at Staples) and an X-Acto knife. I also made one to use for the vine.

Next, I grabbed a tasty beverage, turned on some dancing music, and started painting. I used a foam brush for this project. The vine was fairly simple, just rotating one stencil back and forth. For the flowers, I had to flip the stencil from one side to the other which meant that I had to clean it a lot more often and got paint all over my hands (not unusual).

Connecting the flowers to the vine was a little more difficult. I tested the foam brush that I had been using, but it was no good. Really messy and hard to control. I had another brush hanging around the house, but wasn't happy with those results either. I finally dug an extra cosmetic sponge out of my makeup bag and was able to have a little more control over where the paint was going.

Everything dried without being smudged or walked on by the cats. Success.

 Welcome Aboard!