Wonderful to Worn Wire Baskets

Why in the world would anyone take perfectly wonderful wire baskets and make them worn and aged-looking?  Because I like them like that!

Remember these two black wire baskets I bought when out treasure hunting last week?  They were just too new, too shiny, too black for me.

So I decided to age them.

First I used Rust-Oleum chrome and cinnamon paint and sprayed them.  A heavy coat of chrome and a light coat of cinnamon.

With a foam brush I applied a thick coat of gesso - careful to leave spaces in the cracks with the cinnamon and chrome showing through.

After the gesso dried the underlayer of paint appeared to be rust.  Yay!  BUT  I was not through - this was not aged enough.  I went back and sprayed a light coat of cinnamon and spritzed over it with a very light coat of black.

Another two coats of gesso and then a couple of hit-or-miss coats of turquoise craft paint with a foam brush and perfection was achieved.  We have rusty and we have crusty.  It just took patience to sit and watch the paint dry.  

Well, I did not really sit and watch all those coats of paint drying .  I used the time to make cloth tags.  Ever since Tammy at Homespun Happenings taught us how to send cloth through the printer, I have been printing muslin and using it in several projects.  Read Tammy's here!  This time I prewashed a piece of yellow calico and taped it to some heavy cardstock.  Read what I did with a cloth menu here.

I flew over to the Graphics Fairy to pick up the birds on a branch image. I took the image over to Pic Monkey to monkey around with the pic!  I added a border and a pale aged background.  On one image I typed "Birds of Paris" (a weak pun, I know!) and on the other "Storage Basket" (how utterly obvious!).  I was so caught up with the playing with the overlays and fonts, I forgot that the size would be too big for small tags.  I had to adapt them.  One big HINT here:  Make sure your tape is not over the margins of where the image will be printed.  The image will be printed on the tape.  

See the shiny tape over the brown border?  All of that part of the image was not printed on the cloth.

I could only use the middle section of the tag for the large basket.

Out came the Cropadile.  This tool punches a hole in cloth, paper, and metal.  Then it will set a grommet in the hole.  I use a heavy paper as a backing when punching through cloth.

This is the cloth tag for the smaller basket.  I kept the piece of paper behind the holes and applied the grommets.  I used mini jute to tie the tag to the basket.

A-a-a-h-h-h-h!  So turquoise, so aged, so distressed.
AND I love the aged look of the cloth tag, too.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Let's have a close-up of that tag.  It is almost exactly as I pictured it would be.  If you look closely, I got a little carried away with the fraying of the edges.  So carried away in fact I ripped off the Birds of Paris type!  Sometimes distressing hurts.

For the tag for the large basket I just used one grommet with mini jute as a tie.  You see on this tag I had to lose the ends on both sides.  Therefore it no longer says "Storage Basket".  There is only "Basket"!

Here is the final product.  I think this one is my favorite of the two.  I like the size and the shape.  I like the aged paint and the tag (even if it does not have all of its parts.).  

I have decided it is okay to pick favorites if the projects do not have names.  I have not named any projects so far this year.  I will warn you though there is an Arabella in the back of my truck waiting to be completed.  Come back and meet her soon.  Send some warm temps to South Carolina so I can finish painting her. She has been demanding to be let loose!

See y'all!

NOTE:  Someone just reminded me that I did name the chalkboard Moe Roccan.  So I did not tell the truth above.  How I managed to forget a huge red chalkboard sitting in my breakfast/craft/dog room, I do not know!

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