French Garden Bench

I was a bad blogger this week and did not take before pictures.  I'll just describe the bench and you will get a clear picture.  Cute pine bench from the 1980's with a little storage space when you lift up the seat.  Now you have a visual.  Cute but needs updating; right?

 My very patient husband painted the bench with Rustoleum American Accents Blossom White.  This is suitable for outdoors should someone really want to make it a garden bench out in the yard.  Next I downloaded an image from the Graphics Fairy.  I used only her frame, not the printed words of the Graphic.  To make it larger than it was, I enlarged it by about 50 percent.  Then I cut the enlarged image in quarters.  I took each quarter and made another copy by enlarging the image 200 percent.  Are you following?  Now I performed my latest technique for the third week in a row.  (I think I'm addicted to wax paper.)  You got it, I did a transfer one quarter at a time with wax paper on my ink jet printer.  That's the perk of using wax paper.  You don't need the laser printer.  It was a little tricky and the original images had the printing on them, but I just couldn't get the letters to match up.  Ergo the extreme sanding in the middle of my frame.  Not to worry.  I love chippy and shabby anyway.  I adjusted the image once again, only smaller, so I could add a little something to the skirt of the bench.  Then I took my beautiful script stencil and stenciled Le Jardin in the middle.  Now the wax paper transfer image looks a little grayish and not black, so I used a medium gray acrylic paint and added a dash of black to darken my paint to do the lettering.  This gave a little contrast between the beautiful frame and the printed word.  For the smaller LJ, for Le Jardin of course, I used Martha Stewart's new script font.  It's a two-inch size.  Worked great.  When it was complete, I sealed it with Valspar Clear Flat which is also suitable for outdoors.

 Ever since I let Cindy be in last week's photo shoot of my Le Chien crate, she thinks she's my professional model.  Who am I to argue?  After all, she works for treats.  Isn't she cute?  She's the love of our lives.

Thanks for stopping by.  You're welcome in the garden any time.

As an afterthought, while this was scheduled to be posted, I forgot to mention that because the Rustoleum paint is a satin, be sure to sand it down before you apply the transfer image.  Just a light sanding will do it.  You don't have to get wild and crazy like I do.