Inside of my handmade gift challenge, I secretly challenged myself to make my brother a bunch of gifts re-purposing odd stuff I found in my basement. Fun, right? This is one of the gifts.
Find: Dan’s mom gave me these countertop samples from (I’m guessing) the 70s or early 80s. She was (of course) totally correct in thinking I would be interested in junk like this. (p.s. Can you imagine an oil company putting their name on a consumer product like this now? Crazy.)
All that faux woodgrain was just begging to be showcased, so I decided to tile the samples on a piece of scrap wood and hot glued them all in place. I had more samples than I needed to fill the surface of the wood, so I will save them for a future project.
I had visions of a line drawing on top of the samples. My brother’s a long-time fan of The Simpsons, so I sifted through the wide world of Simpsons characters before settling on Mr. Burns. But not just the regular “excellent” Mr. Burns. I wanted the Mr. Burns from that X-Files parody when everyone thought he was an alien. And he was nice and saying things like, “I bring you love.” (I searched for a video to show you, but can you believe there’s not one out there? Not in English, anyway. So hey, you either remember it, or it doesn’t matter.)
I found an image online, printed it out at the dimensions I needed and did the pencil transfer method onto my countertop canvas. I did the whole thing in graphite and sprayed it with a clear sealer to protect it, but it was still a bit faint. So I went over the graphite with a fine-tip Sharpie to give it a little bit more presence.
It’s still a bit hard to see, but I like how subtle it is. You really have to get close to see what’s going on. From far away, it just looks like a bunch of squares.
Do you have something you want to repurpose but don’t quite know what to do? E-mail me at erin (at) lansdownelife.com. I’d love to help!
