Industrial Art

December 29, 2013 by Terry

The past few days I have been busy organizing and getting things ready to put in my booth at the Old Creamery. While going through all my stuff I came across an item that I have had for quite some time and had great plans for, but had tucked away due to other things needing attention first. I decided that my booth needed some wall art and so it was time to do something with this item. The item is actually a piece of an actual airplane, the tail piece to be exact. It is a panel off the vertical stablizer (I may have spelled that incorrectly!….sorry!)

Now, I am a lover of Restoration Hardware style and I absolutely love their industrial artwork. I just cannot afford to buy what I like. But I can afford to try and imitate the style of it! That is exactly what I did with my little piece of the airplane….

Here’s what I did…. I started out with some old left over fence board we had under our deck.

Now, I wanted it to have an aged look not a fresh cut look so I mixed up an experimental concoction to stain the wood. In a container I mixed up some left over brown stain, some white acrylic paint and …. some of my coffee! Yah, I needed some liquid to thin it out and I was too lazy to go in the house to get some water…. I figured coffee was in the same color family and might actually enhance the look….

The stain being an oil product kinda floats on the mixture of paint and coffee and it separates just enough to give it a nice verigated look…more natural than applying each ingredient separately.

This is what it looks like when applied to the boards…

I quite like the way it turned out! I think I will use this mixture again!

Next I got my husband to cut me a piece of scrap plywood to fit the piece of airplane…

Then I covered the plywood with burlap….

We also measured the fence boards and cut them to fit for a frame around the burlap covered plywood…

Next I stripped the paint off the piece, it was an offensive yellow and hunter green and just didn’t look nice on the burlap…not at all the rustic industrial look I was going for.

After I removed most of the paint, I gave it a bit of a sanding to smooth out some of the bumps left by some of the paint that wouldn’t come off. Next I gave it a thin coat of Miss Mustard Seed’s Milk Paint, I used typerwriter. I like how it dried in a nice flat black color. I sanded it a bit when dry to reveal some of the aluminum on the part and some of the small rivets holding the piece together…

Next I positioned the piece onto the burlap covered plywood and fastened it from behind.

Then added the fence board frame…. I love how it turned out! I also added a medallion in the center of it after to finish it off…I forgot to take a picture though.

I had taken it to my booth yesterday and I forgot to take proper photos of it…I got too excited about moving into my booth! I will take more pictures and post them on Monday …that way you can see my booth too!