Let’s Whittle

[hmoosek]

There is an old German tradition that involves hanging a glass pickle on the Christmas tree. The first kid to find it gets a special gift. I life carving these and putting them into jars. I tell everyone look what I canned this year. Hahahaaa!

[heavyhitterokra]

Moose,

Your paint story sounds like one of my escapades. Years ago, I traded a cast iron bathtub to a man who was using an old Coca~Cola box as a horse watering trough. I thought I'd simply sand it down and refinish it.  For decades before it was a horse trough, it had sat out in front of an old gas station under many different names. As I sanded, I discovered that it had 5 layers of old paint, at least one of them was oil-based. It had the original Coke-red, an R.C. Cola blue, a Mello-Yello yellow, a Mountain Dew green, and a final coat of silver clothes line pole type paint.

After sanding through an entire box of plugged up paper, we took it to have it sand blasted. It came back a wonderful, shiny, bright, silver. We were well pleased!

Trouble was, it was so shiny that no paint would stick to it, but we didn't know that until we painted it.
Coca~Cola red is an expensive color too!  When it dried, we peeled the masking tape off and along with it came a giant piece of paint nearly the size of a paper plate!

Well, back to the drawing board ...

About a month and a lot of sanding later, we scuffed it really well and painted it single-stage red and paid a guy $100.00 to hand letter the stamped metal. Now, it looks like it's brand new. At first, I wasn't sure I liked the looks of it being so new and shiny-looking, but over the years, it kinda grows on ya.  When it was all said and done, I think we were in to it for about $800.00 on the sand blasting and double paint job because of the base metal that was too shiny to hold the first coat.

I built wooden innards for it and set it out in the Summer Kitchen.  Now it holds all of our paper plates, plastic forks, knives, spoons, paper cups, and napkins.

My camera tinted this blue, it's a way different color in person.

[hmoosek]

Oooooweeee I like that! heavyhitterokra!