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Show an Old Item Some Love {Michaels RE-Love Challenge}

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April is Earth Month, and it’s a great time for all of us to look around our homes and see if there are things we could be using differently or for a better purpose than we are currently.

In my house, it’s this microwave cart. microwave cart

I stole it from my parents’ house when I moved out (more than 15 years ago!) and I’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since. It served as my sewing table for years, and in our current house it’s just floated from room to room. It was a piece of storage in my daughter’s playroom most recently, but lately had been shuttled into the hall where it became a gathering place for things she wasn’t really playing with and I didn’t know where to put. michaels re-love challenge

I’m sure it deserves better, even though it is just a decades-old piece of pressboard. So I’m going to try to clean it up, pretty it up and make it useful for my daughter’s art area as a place for storage, a work space when she’s a bit bigger (or that I can use when we’re creating together) and a display area.

I’m doing this with a lot of help from Michaels, which supplied a $200 gift card to help me buy supplies. cart redo supplies

Here’s some of what I got:

  • two cans of primer spraypaint in white
  • two cans of light green spraypaint
  • Martha Stewart chalkboard paint in blue
  • matching regular paint (to paint some molding I got to glue around the edges of the top, which I’ll show you if I actually do it)
  • set of four 12×12 cork pieces
  • a magnetic dry erase board
  • mounting tape for attaching these things to the sides

I also got the pieces of edging I mentioned earlier, some scrapbook paper to decoupage the inside of the drawer, possibly the back of the unit, and maybe some storage boxes, a few plastic storage pieces and some fresh chalk for the chalkboard.

Getting Started

The first thing I did was to take off some tape that was holding down one edge of the laminate on the side of the top and glued it down with wood glue. It’s being held in place with more tape while it dries. cart step one

I also pulled out the little cardboard door that covered the bottom shelf. I’d rather have stuff accessible, and it was ugly and falling apart anyway.

I wiped the whole thing down with a damp washcloth, and while the wood glue dried I went ahead and primed the drawer. This was super easy but made me regret letting my husband put all the giant boxes we had in the house out for the recyclers this morning!

Next up will be priming and then painting the rest of the cart, and then the fun begins.

Looking for some inspiration for your own Earth Month projects? Check out the Michaels LookBook for plenty of fun ideas to reuse items in your home.

 

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Comments

  1. It is interesting how you have observed the impact a old item can have. This is very beneficial information. Congratulations again on a good job Sarah.

Have you read?

Knits with Sheep

It felt like it had been a while since I’d done a roundup of knitting patterns involving sheep, and if search is any indication, that is true. I found a roundup of patterns for knit sheep from a few years ago, but the only one with v I could find is from 2015. So it’s definitely time to revisit this fun genre of knitting patterns.

This all started with a headband. Alyssa Kaat’s Icelandic Sheep Headband (free on Ravelry) to be specific. Ravelry showed it to me as a pattern highlight and I couldn’t resist taking a closer look. It’s worked with two colors of worsted weight yarn and alternates sheep with stars around your head.

Another great sheepy headband is this one from Loch Fyne Crafts on Etsy. These sweet little sheep are worked in bulky yarn and you can make the background look like field and sky or work it in a solid color.

Or make a headband (or a hat, cowl, or all three) covered with a flock of sheep with this set of patterns from New Age Knitting CA. These pieces also use the field/sky coloring, but you can use whatever colors of worsted weight yarn you like.

Speaking of hats, there’s also the sheep hat from Lynann Knits Designs. The sample was worked in Icelandic wool to make the sheep and the hat extra fuzzy and warm, but any worsted weight yarn will work.

There’s also the Wandering Sheep hat from Kat Hudon (on Ravelry), which features a fun collection of speckled sheep that can be worked in different yarn weights to make different sizes of hats for kids and adults.

And lest you think sheep need to be knit in traditional stranded colorwork, check out the Rebel Sheep Mob blanket by Deborah Moore. This one is worked in mosaic knitting using fingering weight yarn. In mosaic knitting you’re only working with one color per row so it’s pretty easy. You can find this pattern on Ravelry.

I can’t possibly share sheep knitting patterns without mentioning the amazing Black Sheep Shadow Shawl by Mark Jamieson. Shadow knitting is a technique I want to do more of, but it involves working two rows alternating in two different colors and the pattern emerges when you look at the design from an angle. It’s so cool and the sheep on this one are amazing! It’s not a beginner project but well worth the work. You can find it on Ravelry or at the designer’s website.