Shabby Chic Nesting Trays

My GIBBS Happy Mail partner this round was Tracy who wished for a tray to hold projects in progress.  I found this set of nesting trays and could not resist shabbifying them.  I started with 2 layers of light blue paint, then a coat of crackle medium and topped it off with a coat of white paint.  OHMYGOSH it was AWFULLLLL!  The crackle happened so much faster than I could keep up with and I did not get anything of the look I was going for.  The cracks were too wide and too blue!  But after another 3 coats of white paint covering up some of the blue, and a bit of light sanding on some edges, it finally looked more like my brain was imagining it would.   I also added 2 coats of mod podge to seal them and to top off the crackle struggle, temps were hovering around 100 the entire week with humidity in the upper 90% range so it took FOREVER for each coat of paint to dry, eeeek! 

I'm so excited that you can coat more than one layer of paint over the crackle medium and it will still crackle a little bit - I may be more adventurous in the future knowing this now!

I added some fancy background mats and some simple silhouette designs cut with my Silhouette.  I thought that the plain blue mats needed something more so I used one of my monster sized StampinUp! background stamps to add a white ivy pattern.  The mat design file is by Sweet Afton and the ladies are by Hero Arts. 

The larger tray has a mat design by Samantha Walker (one of my fave designers in the store!) but I flipped it upside down to fit the House of 3 bird cage design better.  I love how Silhouette has so many different and awesome designers in their store!

This was a really fun project despite the initial crackle challenge (and also having them fall off my deck railing 10' down to rocks while I was taking pics of them - good thing I was going for the distressed look, LOL!) so I bought two more sets of these trays to alter for Christmas gifts this year - heck, I may even keep one for myself!

Thanks for visiting!