Feature Friday: French Book Cart

We have a very elegant feature for you today.  Blogger Little Miss Maggie shares this amazing book cart she transformed from a seriously uninspiring garage sale find.  First the finished product.

I love that this piece is black!  We see a lot of pastels here on Maisondestencils.  Don't get me wrong, they're great, but there is something timeless and classy about black.  Here's a before picture so you can see just how big a transformation this little piece of furniture made.

Super awesome Grateful Dead stickers at the bottom.  Not!  Maggie started by sending those stickers back to Jerry Garcia and then painted the whole piece Canyon Black from the Rustoleum American Accents line.

Her next step was stenciling our popular Hotel De L'Avenir stencil using acrylic ivory paint.   For a more aged look, Maggie hand painted with raw umber on top of the stencil to give a varied, uneven tone to the letters and line work.

Hotel De L'Avenir is a big stencil (12x18) and didn't completely fit on the cart.  So she used the extra text to jazz up the sides of the shelves.  Great idea!

It's always good to remember that you are not married to what we put on a stencil.  You can use as much or little of it for a stenciling project as suits your need.  But we're happy to do customs if you do need something wild and crazy.  :)

She finished up the cart by sanding and sealing with Valspar Clear Flat Spray.  It looks fabulous!

You can check out Little Miss Maggie's original blog post here.  Her whole blog is terrific, do check it out.  You can also check out the Hotel De L'Avenir stencil in our Feedsack category.

Thanks so much to Maggie for the feature this week.  Don't forget, if you've got a stenciling project you'd like featured, we're only an email away.