Thrifty Thursday: Take 1

So, during the week I hit up one of our local Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters Thrift Stores (CHKD from here on out, that is just a mouthful!) to find a project. I had no clear direction once I arrived. Unfortunately, I had no clear direction once I was leaving either. However, I did find this frame and really interesting children's book:

So I decided to grab them up, repaint the frame, and insert one of the pages from the book as colorful but whimsical art for our office. Anything with a nautical theme is fair game in here, and this had a nice color pallet to work with.

This is where it gets a bit tricky. The frame looks like wood - but isn't. I would love to believe I'm a spray-painting expert, but I'm not, so I sent Husband in to Ace to grab whatever he thought would work. He came out with this:

  

          

It is an oil-based spray paint (not my first choice) and seems to be for metal and wood. Hmph. Well, you know, I didn't even read the labels until I had started coating the frame. Perhaps it doesn't matter at all, perhaps any yellow spray paint would be thinly coating this plastic frame. We may never know. What I do know is that I've been applying coats all day and it is finally starting to look like a solid, gloss yellow. This is where it started:

 

After several more coats of paint, and fiddling with which page I liked best from the book (not nautical really, though a map of a harbor in Stockholm, Sweden), I smashed it all together into the frame and hung it next to a giant octopus.