Productive Weekend

We had a busy weekend full of projects and quality time with friends and family. I managed to wrap up a few things that have been lying around and pick up a few more pieces that need attention....

A few weeks ago I found this little guy at Goodwill for $1. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but it had lots of potential! With summer in full gear, I figured it would make a perfect caddy to hold silverware and napkins for outdoor BBQ's. He started out like this:

And with a little primer, paint, and vinyl ended up like this:

I've seen so many catalogs and projects lately with numbers....I love how that personalizes any item so I figured I'd incorporate that into my caddy with our house numbers.

In between coats of paint, I was also working on a project I've been meaning to finish up for awhile. My husband and I just took a trip to Monterey to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. While we were there we stumbled upon the cutest shop with all kinds of home decor and pictures. Eric liked this one piece of prohibition artwork, but unfortunately it was $300 and too big to fit anywhere in our house. So of course, I copied down the saying and decided to make it myself! It took awhile to find the right size frame, but eventually I stumbled upon this guy:

For $7 he was perfect! I took out the beautiful picture and glass and gave the frame a nice coat of brown paint:

The original picture was printed on a heavy piece of matting and already cut to the perfect size, so I just turned it over and painted it tan. Then came the painstaking part of the project....cutting out all the lettering on vinyl using my Silhouette machine (easy), piecing the words together (not too bad), and lining them up straight and centered on the background (very frustrating)! After they were all situated just right, I taped off any of the exposed background. 

Then I gave it a coat of tan paint (background color) to hopefully seal off any bubbles where the vinyl wasn't completely adhered to the mat.

Then finally a coat of brown paint.

In the end, it turned out like this:

What do you think? I may distress it to give it more of an aged look..........but for now it's just waiting to be hung up in our pool room!

I'm linking up to 20 Below Thursdays over at Christina's Adventures!