Surf Shop Mosaics

These are some of the mosaic projects I did at Aqua Surf Shop

  The Aqua sign is huge, about 6ft long. I cut it out of plywood and used some mosaic tiles I already had so that worked out great

These pieces were just precut wooden circles that I had picked up at a store closing sale, they were used for some sort of display I think. Anyway I ended up tiling some of them with some mirror and some with 4"square blue tiles that I smashed up with a hammer.

I smashed the mirror with a hammer too but this is NOT the best way when using mirror or stained glass sheets for mosaics. It doesn't smash well. It really is better to cut mirror and glass...but I don't always do that! 

It's a surf shop so had to make a surfboard.

I cut the shape from plywood and hand cut the pieces from sheets of stained glass. It's about 5 feet tall and can hang vertically or horizontally.

These are mosaic waves also cut from wood and I used the same tile that is on the sign. 

These are in the window so this is not the best picture...

A pic of one of the dressing rooms... they were basically an empty box when I started

 I built these benches to fit out of plywood, painted and did a mosaic on the front using glass beads

 I made a couple of different mirrors for both of them too

Handmade Surf Shop Mannequins

  These are some fun and funky art mannequins I made for Aqua Surf Shop.

Purely for looks, not for clothing display.

I cut the bodies out of plywood. 

I built the bases out of plywood as well and textured them with joint compound, handpainting everything

A back view.

 I attached the bodies to a galvanized pole and screwed flanges into the plywood bases then screwed the poles into the flanges.

 For the dimensional faces, it was kind of an experiment but it worked,

I shaped crumpled aluminum foil into the cheek, eye, nose, lips and eyebrow shapes and hot glued those on. Then I used joint compound to smooth that out, it took several coats, and I just kept playing with it and sanding along the way to get the look I wanted.

I drilled holes in the tops of the heads and used colored wire I had to make the hair

Her

A little closer look at the base

Him

Painted Bottles

I love to paint on bottles. Something about the endless painting surface going around the bottle is just fun to paint. 

I have several different brands of the glass paint that you bake in the oven to cure and that's what I use. It really is durable.

 Blue Sun Bottle.
I usually mix a bunch of different beads and wrap wire to use with bottle stoppers that I find here and there

Octopus and Coral

Seashells with shell stoppers

Fun blue bottles. The stopper for this is a ceramic knob glued to a cork with beaded wire

Face Bottle, she has some small brass leaves on the beaded wire too

This is a really talllll sun bottle

This is a GIANT bottle, it was a display bottle from a restaurant. Painted with a big blue crab and seaweed

This flower bottle has glass leaves on the beaded wire and some kind of thick green construction wire (that was salvaged from somewhere!) for the tendrils

Another face.

 She has a vintage faucet knob for the stopper and lots of crazy beaded wire for her "hair"

Painted Bowls

Painted wooden bowls that are usually in abundance at thrift stores.....

This was a plain wooden lidded bowl that I painted like a big flower bud

And this one I painted with a zinnia pattern and added another bowl for the bottom

Painted Wooden Cake Stands

These are cake plates or serving stands I've made using wooden pieces and parts and hand cut tops.
 They are all assembled with wood glue and screws then primed and painted. 
For all my painted cake plates I recommend that you don't put the food directly on the painted surface but use some sort of liner...you know... don't want to poison anybody

 This one started with two thrift store wooden pineapple candle holders.
The bottom is an inverted wooden bowl.
I cut the middle plate part from  plywood and  played around with the pieces until I came up with a good configuration.
 I used a ceramic knob on the inside of the pineapple on top to cover the candle hole

For these two,  I used cut balustrade pieces for the middle and cut the bases and tops out of plywood

The base for this one started as a wooden lamp base....

I cut the top out of plywood

This base was a wooden candlestick...

... The bottom is an inverted wooden bowl...those that you see EVERYWHERE at thrift stores

The other matching candlestick...

.....with a wavy plywood top and another inverted wooden bowl on the bottom

And one more!
Linking up to...

Palm Tree from a Column

This palm tree is something I made for a surf shop.
 I had bought an interior wooden column, at a thrift store I think, not really having a project in mind but I'm sure the price was right and I snagged it.
Wanting to make some big pieces for this shop, I spied that colum in my workshop, aka my garage, and palm tree popped in my head.
I built the base from plywood and added casters to make it easy to move around.
I did a mosaic treatment on the base with round red mosaic tile sheets and used white grout.

The leaves were handmade using commercial fryer filters, unused of course ;),
The filters are basically big, thick, textured sheets of paper, LOVE! 
I had to buy some long stemmed foliage from a craft store (at full retail price-ugh) to use as the stem for the palm fronds. 
I cut a leaf shape from the paper filters and glued two leaves together with the now stripped down foliage stem in between.  I left plenty of stem exposed at the end so I could stick them into the tree.

I gave the leaves a funky blue and green paint finish and also created some kind of palm tree berries (they have berries right?) from a Christmas ornament spray that I already had and painted them red to give a little pop.
 If you look closely in this photo you can see the fence post finial I put at the top of the tree to finish it off and as you can see painted the column and added some swirls.  I attached the leaves by drilling holes at the top of the column and sticking the stems in

Suitcase Pet Bed

Found the suitcase at a thrift store, it was just a plain brown suitcase, not the hard sided kind.
I ended up just cutting the top of it off. I taped off the zipper since I wanted it to show and spray primed and spray painted the suitcase.
I added feet that I had in my stash and gave the whole thing a fun decorative paint treatment

This is a pretty large suitcase so it could work for kitties or small dogs

The floral part of the bedding was actually a ladies skirt that I cut up and used to cover some foam for the bed. I used more foam for the sides and covered them with some zebra fabric.
I ended up hot glueing decorative gimp around the top to finish it off.
 I've made lots more of these and sold them in the past but, no pictures.....what I was thinking?
Linking up to.....

Garage Door Headboard

I found a wooden garage door set in a pile at a thrift store and bought all the panels for $15 bucks
I had to cut them down to fit them in my house, you don't realize how big a garage door is until you see it unassembled.
I hinged three of them together to use as my headboard. I made a room divider with the rest of them but that has been sold and unfortunately don't have a picture but it was pretty cool.

They were already the off white color, I just dry brushed them a little with some tan-ish paint and added the wooden decorative plaques

Kitchen Hutch Redo

This is my kitchen hutch that started as a road side find,

well, part of it

This middle part is the "found" part.

It is all wood and had a medium wood finish with glass doors and shelves, 

all perfect,  even the light bulb in it still worked.

I removed the glass doors since 2 boys and glass doors just didn't work for me.

On that same roadside, there were also brand new cabinet door fronts still in the wrappers

 and I grabbed them too. 

They ended up being an exact fit to apply to the sides for some added dimension.

 I bought a large supply of picture frame molding from a frame shop that was closing 

and have used it for so many projects, this one included.

It's all mismatched, but I personally love that look.

I used Home Depot fence post finials for the feet.

Click on the "things to make with molding" heading to see all the ways I've used

picture frame molding

I cut some of the molding down to use as the door handles...

Used more of the molding to make the drawer pulls. 

More molding on the edges...

This shows the side pieces that I built from scratch, they are separate from the main hutch. 

I built them specifically to my dimensions for that wall in my kitchen, it fills up that whole wall. 

 I bought baskets for storage and it is the perfect spot for school supplies for my boys. 

I used more molding to face out the shelves and around the top of the side pieces as well. 

 I primed, painted and applied a dry brushed distressed finish... 

distressed + kids = good.  

The interior of the hutch is painted in a yummy granny smith apple green

Thanks for checking it out.

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