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How To Make Your Food Blurry in 87 Easy Steps

Here's a fun thing about my 1965 duplex:  there's no pantry.  Like, at all. So my Ikea HEMNES glass-door cabinet is now a food-holder.  It works great!

The problem is, you can see the food. All the time.

Also, my kitchen is full of snakes:

Yes, I forgot to take a "before" picture again.




















Anyway, this is nothing a can of glass frosting spray can't handle.   I copied my design from a window cling film design you can get just about anywhere.


I sketched the pattern onto the front of the glass doors with a sharpie, a yardstick, all the math ever, and about seventy-eight little square templates (okay, 3 of them. But I had to make them over and over again because the Sharpie ink kept making the edges soft, which wasn't remotely helpful).

The next step was to tape off all the lines on the inside of the glass, using the Sharpie lines as a guide.


Frosting the glass on the inside means - I hope - that it'll be less likely to get scratched by people going in and out of the cabinet.  Of course, there's more chance of the food scratching it this way, so, six one half dozen the other?  Time will tell.




















In all it took four rolls of thin Washi tape, for both doors. Man that stuff's handy.

The next step was a Pinterest Fail.  I attempted to do the thing where you spritz water onto an area to be painted (in frosted or silver, from what I've seen) and it comes out looking like *drumrolllll* antique glass, or watered glass, or whatever you want to call the pattern of wibbly woobly melted-looking bits of glass.

However. This is not what happened.

What happened was the water caused the frosting spray not to adhere to the glass at all, and it fell off in big chunks as soon as it was dry. Also, some of the glass outside the squares was not as dry as I thought it was - hence the streakiness you see here.

So,  I had to un-tape and scrape clean an entire door and re-do it from scratch, including taping. So, I guess technically I did three doors this weekend, not two.

However, the end product was worth it:

Can you see the food? Is there soup??  YOU HAVE NO IDEA!  MUAHAHA!!! *ahem*cough*

So it doesn't block out anything.  At best this made the food blurry - but I'm satisfied with it. It's still a little less messy-looking, but this tones down the chaos effect that we had going on here before. The food just sort of fades into the furniture now, instead of sticking out like a sore thumb.



















The full monty.  Sewing machines and stack of grocery bags and all. (Sorry).


Even though I used the thinnest Washi tape I could find for the "lead lines", I still wish I'd tried for something thinner.   Still, I think it works just fine the way it is.  It's not supposed to mimic leaded and frosted glass, only lend the impression of.

Overall, I'm pleased with the way it came out. The food is nice and blurry, and it helps the cabinet, and the kitchen, look a bit more clean and organized. And I like the way the glass pattern works with the style of the cabinet itself.  I'll be honest, I neglected to even consider that when I was picking a design - I just wanted something pretty - but it works!



There are, of course, more things I want to do with this cabinet.  But these doors were the thing I wanted to be sure to have finished before the Halloween party this year, so that people don't have to look at all the disorganized food.  Fait accompli.


See you next time!

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Whew!

I know, it's been a hot minute since I posted here, but that's because I haven't been working on any projects around the house.  I've been painting, sketching along with the Inktober drawing challenge, and crocheting all the things. I'm also prepping for a Halloween party, which I haven't thrown since 2014!

I started a fish tank, too. Right now, it's devoid of actual fish - I let it sit a couple of weeks to cycle, got a couple of plants (the leafy little Anubias nana and the Marimo moss ball (actually a beneficial algae) above), and have been contemplating getting a bunch more plants and a Betta but not actually doing it. Aside from a bit of mold on the wood (need some snails to eat it) it's coming along beautifully for, you know, not having any fish in it. Because it's a fish tank.  Let's be real: it's a box of water with a log in it. But it'll grow.

I do have several furniture projects planned:

• Refinishing the once-and-forever art table, which I've been "working on" refinishing for over a year now
• Refinishing my nightstand, an antique plant stand/hall table 
• Refinishing a little wooden chowki table that's seen better days
• Frosting the glass on the doors of my Ikea HEMNES pantry cabinet, and painting the rest of the unit. 
• Staining my Ikea FORHOJA kitchen cart, something I've been thinking about for three years and hadn't decided on until recently
• Possibly building a big honking sideboard for the living room from scratch. Sort of. 

Lots of projects to keep me in the garage this winter! 

But this month, I'm mostly focused on the Halloween party: 

• Buy all the spooky things
• Make all the other things spooky
• Don't have a heart attack over established friends base meeting new friends from work at the party
• Spray-paint the dog* 
• Finish crocheting the little pseudo-Victorian boot spats I'm making for my costume, block them, and sew buttons on 

* not really, but Daisy is getting a body paint costume, as soon as I order some dog-safe paint

I'm working on a painting right now, slowly, and I have no idea when I'll be finished.  But here's the last one I made, finished three weeks ago: 

I also painted this little papier-maché skull for Halloween.  It's not shaped much like an actual human skull, but I tried to get it as realistic-looking as I could anyway.  I'm kind of proud of poor Yoric here. As a friend said to me this morning, it's hard to paint dimension and shape onto something that has none.  Rewarding, when you get it right, but hard.  

Anyway, I'm off to Halloween all the things.  See you again soon!