This year, we will be kicking off our annual Apple Butter festival with our "Beast of a Feast" fundraiser! One feature of this fundraiser will be a silent auction with many exciting items.
**To help make our auction a success, please consider donating nature-related items to be auctioned, such as gift certificates or "gently used" outdoor gear such as kayaks, snowshoes, skis, fishing gear, and more. Together, we can connect even more people to nature!
Today's guest post comes from Karin Balkon Chudy, who writes about restoring this "roadside rescue" dresser (with the help of Katie Woodhams) to be auctioned off at our silent auction. Come out to Fenner on October 12th to make a bid on this gorgeous dresser yourself!
WHEW!!!!!! That is the first thing I have to say about this baby! The second thing I should tell you is the BACK STORY... A couple weeks ago, my niece contacted me about donating a piece of furniture for an AUCTION for Fenner Nature Center for whom she works. I of course said... "HECK YEAH"... :)
I said, "I have some small pieces," but I told her that if she came upon a dumpster dive or a ROADSIDE RESCUE that would be cool. Seeing as it was for a Nature Center, I thought it would be poignant that we saved something from the landfill. She said she would keep her eyes peeled. Well, no more than a few days later, she sends me a picture of THIS!!
A SOLID mahogany 4 drawer dresser just sitting on the side of the road... WHAT THE HECK!!! Some girls have all the luck... :) We got to scheduling a date when she could come stay for the weekend and we could knock out this project.
And knock it out we did!~ Here, she is making me laugh at the fact that she had no sooner backed up her truck and I was attacking the dresser like a PIT CREW in a race.
I don't like to waste time...
We stripped off the old worn and broken brass pulls and filled the old holes.
Here is my niece Katie getting ready to sand the top. (I don't mind telling you that I loved having an ASSISTANT to do this job!)
Above is the solid mahogany stripped bare, and below it is stained with a nice mix of cherry and walnut stain.
Now for the fun part. We were really trying to keep our "footprint" as small as possible on this project. I KNEW what paint I wanted to use.
Even better, the color I had pictured in my head was an exact match to Ce Ce Caldwell's MICHIGAN PINE... If you have not guessed yet, we are from MICHIGAN... It doesn't get any better than picking an environmentally safe paint, for a rescue project, for an auction, for a Nature Center, IN MICHIGAN... and its named MICHIGAN PINE... are you hearing angels singing yet????? :) I was.
So here we were... only about 3 hours in and we are already painting the dresser.
This is how we left it for the night... It was waiting for its... "BEAUTI-FI-CATION."
When Katie and I had gone back and forth in emails talking about what we wanted this project to LOOK like... we had finally decided on a FERN... But we didn't want the regular Fern that everyone thinks of... We wanted something STYLISH...
So I had researched some ferns and this is the one we decided on. (I am not a botanist and I KNEW artistic license would be used... so we have NO IDEA what type of Fern this really is... :)) We drew it on in the morning and got to painting!!
I can't tell you how much FUN I had working on this project. Having another artist to work with and being able to have your idea come to fruition on the canvas (in this case the dresser) was amazing. Even though it took us 6 hours combined, just to paint on the Fern. :)
Here I am distressing everything that we spent all our time painting... LOL!!
and HERE is our mess!!! LOL!!
But it was all worth the MESS for the finished product....
With her new crystal knobs,
and the fern gracefully flowing along her body, she is back to being a BEAUTIFUL part of Nature.
Here is Me and my Gorgeous Niece Katie... all cleaned up trying to look as BEAUTIFUL as this dresser... which will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Going from Ugly Duckling to BEAUTIFUL Swan!!
To find out more about the auction you can visit Fenner Nature Center. The auction goes straight to Fenner Conservancy to help them meet their mission of connecting people to nature!
Thank you all, and thank you so much to my Niece Katie Woodhams, for allowing me to be a part of this!! We both didn't know if we could let our baby go... but we know its for a great cause. I hope you all have a BEAUTIFUL day!!
Check out Karin's original blog post too.
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