A Bit of Pinspiration: Vintage Inspired Bathroom Artwork

This weekend I did a quick D.I.Y. project that was both fun and served a purpose.

For almost 4 years we have had a nail in the bathroom above the toilet from where something was hung by the previous owners.  I have mentioned before that we are terrible about hanging things up. Case in point.

My summer vacation officially started on Friday. That’s right, school only just finished this week in Ontario. I try to spend the first week of my summer restoring order to our house room-by-room.

Since Mr. Mechanic had to work on Saturday, I took this as an opportunity to tackle a much-needed bathroom deep clean. This seems to be the thing that I have to get out of the way when it comes to cleaning. Everything else is a much less involved process.

While cleaning, I smashed my wrist on the hand towel rail that is above the toilet. As I was standing there cursing, I once again noticed the lonely nail and thought “I really need to put something there!”

Our bathroom has a tricky colour scheme. So tricky that I bought the exact same shower curtain as what was there when we toured the house! The walls are a hideous cranberry colour and the accent colours (pulled from the curtain) are chocolate brown, yellow and a teal-ish green. Now you see why artwork was a challenge.

Last week I stumbled upon this lovely vintage-look First Aid sign when I was on Pinterest.

{Source: The Virginia House via Claire on Pinterest}

Living with a mechanic, I’m very familiar with all things first aid!

I could have painted a sign that said First Aid, but I decided to put my own twist on it.

A few months ago I found this vintage Elastoplast tin while going through a First Aid kit that I had in the trunk of my car.

With this in mind, I did a Google search for images of vintage Band-Aid tins (I’m a name brand girl – tissues will always be Kleenex and bandages are Band-Aids).

Which brought me to this lovely antique market find:

{Source: Sass and Peril via Claire on Pinterest}

Sorry.  Inspiration hit me so quickly that I didn’t even stop to take photos of the process!

Here’s the gist of what I did:

I used the trace function on my Silhouette to create a stencil from the photo and then cut the stencil from an old overhead. I used painter’s tape to hold the inside pieces of the letters in place when I lifted it off the mat.

I wanted it to have an aged look when it was distressed so I consulted some of Lake Girl Paints’ amazing posts on how to create painted pieces with a lot of dimension and then got painting. My wood was just a piece of pine left over from my faux metal airplane artwork.

After doing a base layer using dark brown, mustard yellow and some black, I left it to dry and then painted over it with an antique white colour.

I sprayed my stencil with repositionable spray adhesive and then transferred it to my piece of wood.

The cross was a mix of red, orange and black to make it a similar colour to my bathroom walls.

The lettering was painted black with a touch of blue. I think a really deep navy colour would have been perfect but I was working with the paint that I had on hand.

After this dried (courtesy of my hair dryer), I sanded it with my palm sander using 220 grit sandpaper. The layers of colour started to show underneath but it needed one more thing.

My original inspiration had a small frame around it and I remembered that Wendy had shared a trick for painting this in her Subway Art post. I didn’t have a ruler to sacrifice but I did have a piece of aluminum. I taped off a frame using Frog tape and then pressed the painted aluminum onto the wood. It worked, but since it was such a long piece of metal I switched to painting along the tape edge with a fine-tipped brush.

Then . . .

More distressing to age the freshly painted frame.

Paint the edges of the sign black.

And finally, ink the edges with Tim Holtz’ Distress Ink in Vintage Photo and smudge some of it onto the corners of the sign to age it further.

Voila!

It’s just what I wanted and it will be hanging in its new home tomorrow on July 8th (believe it or not, that’s a quick turnaround for me).

 

 

 

 

We had beautiful weather for Canada Day so I was able to do most of this outside on the patio. I was even able to write this post outside surrounded by the sound of fireworks.

One more day left of our long weekend – fingers crossed that we finish building a garden that has been in the works since Victoria Day!

Hope your first day of July was a good one!

P.S. Don’t forget to enter my giveaway for a chance to win a copy of My Memories Suite’s digital scrapbooking software!

P.P.S. Check out my other two ‘pinspired’ projects: Shanty 2 Chic's Mason Jar Planter Box and Sarah Ortega's Bird's Nest Pendants.

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