Oh No ...... No More Car Booty

Well today was a sad day indeed. It was the last car boot sale of the season. I have no idea what I am going to do without my Sunday morning car boot sales and bacon butties until next April when one of them starts up again. The other, alas, doesn't start up until the middle of July, until the farmer has managed to get his hay cut and that all depends on the weather! I did grab a couple of bargains though. I found a lovely blue woollen blanket for £2.00 from the car boot sale near Looe for Levi, my Dalmation to snuggle up in this winter and a gorgeous hand painted teapot from the car boot sale at Kernow Mill, also for £2.00, which will look lovely on my dresser when I have finished transforming it with the amazing Annie Sloan paint.

There was also an added bonus at the Kernow Mill sale. A lovely old gentleman with his owls. I love owls. At night, when I take the dogs out, there seems to be hundreds of hooting, tooting, screeching owls in the trees all around my house and I love hearing them. I have also seen them on several occasions swooping silently down the valley on the hunt for mice. 

The owls were absolutely gorgeous, so soft and fluffy, particularly the little brown fluffy one sat on his perch with his little grey friend. The owls travel around the county in the back of a white transit van which has been fitted out with perches. 

The little grey owl in the picture above is apparently a burrowing owl! So cool. I was chatting to another old gentleman who told me he and his wife had 3 owls of their own. A barn owl, a little grey burrowing owl and one like the one with tufty ears in the third picture above. Lucky man. I have cats, dogs and llamas and soon there will be chickens and in our time we have a whole host of other animals such as  rats, hamsters, gerbils, ducks and rabbits but nothing so glorious as an owl. 

I have owl envy :-)

One final note. When I nipped back into Launceston yesterday to pick up the rest of my Annie Sloan Paint, I discovered that there are lots of nice charity shops in the town and basically I can't walk past a charity shop without taking a peek. I know it's rather early to be mentioning Christmas but the simple fact is, that if I don't start preparing for it now, it just sneaks up on me and I end up running around like a lunatic getting stressed and frazzled and not very Christmassy at all. Each year, we have a different colour theme on our Christmas tree. Last year year it was gold and silver and the year before it was fuchsia pink, turquoise and Lime green (sounds yucky but it looked absolutely awesome) but this year I was struggling to figure out what colour to do. Until I spotted these in a Launceston charity shop.

I got 7 reindeer tumblers, 8 cotton napkins embroidered with reindeer and a fabulous table runner for the amazing price of £9.50. So, this year, our Christmas theme is red and white with probably a hint of glitter and glitz thrown in for good measure. 

Annie Sloan Chalk Paint ..... I'm a convert .... Maybe.

I have been blogging on and off for about 18 months or so, and seriously for about the last 8 months and during that time I have read countless blogs, many of which give me loads of inspiration and ideas. Lately, I have noticed the buzz words on a fair few of these blogs is Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. A couple of blogs in particular, Shingle Cottage and One Girl in Pink have some wonderful examples of what the paint can do. Always up for a challenge, and curious to see if the hype is justified, I managed to track down a stockist in Launceston, Cornwall about 20 miles from where I live and yesterday, I hopped in the car and zoomed off to buy some Annie Sloan. I haven't been to Launceston before, despite living in Cornwall for the last 13 years. It's quite a cute little town and has an amazing castle on a hill which dates back to the Norman Conquest and it also has some very cute shops. The lovely shop 'Country Chic' which stocks the Annie Sloan paint is full of lovely shabby chic things which I would love to put in my house.

The first thing I found out about the paint is that it's not cheap. It's £6.25 for a tester pot of 100mls and it's £17.25 for a 1 litre tin. However, having read a fabulous blog post on the One Girl in Pink blog called 'Ten Projects ... One Can of Chalk Paint' I was almost reassured that a little goes a long way. 

Unfortunately, after driving all the way to Launceston, it turned out that they were waiting for a delivery of paint and I had to go back this morning to get the 1 litre cans of Old White that I wanted. I did manage to get some tester pots though, in a variety of gorgeous colours and also a couple of tester pots of Old White. I was very excited. As soon as I got home I grabbed a little table that I had earmarked as my first project and began happily slapping on the paint. I assumed this was the way to do it as this is the way Annie herself does it in the tutorials on the Annie Sloan website. She seems to just slap in on with gay abandon .... absolutely my kind of decorating :-)

The second thing I found is that it is lovely to use. It can be used on virtually anything with hardly any preparation at all. It can be used outside on garden furniture, on metal and on wooden floors as well as on furniture, in fact it can be used on virtually everything and as an added bonus, it doesn't have that horrible paint smell. In fact it actually smells quite nice, sort of like a cross between chalk and clay. 

Two coats of paint later and I haven't even finished one tester pot of Old White paint. I was very impressed. Two coats of clear wax and a light sanding later and voila ...... one gorgeously transformed table.

From this .....                                                                To This ..... in about 3 hours.

I wasn't brave enough to try the dark wax, which basically looks like brown boot polish. Although you can apparently lighten it and darken it by using the clear wax to adjust the colour, I think I will leave that for my next project, some cute little shelves that I had already painted with undercoat many months ago and never got round to finishing and which now has a top coat of fabulous duck egg paint. Watch this space .......