another busy week ahead...

By the end of this week I will become the stenciling queen of San Francisco...

With Dining by Design just around the corner (like next week!!) I have been working on painting these wood panels that will become folding screens. On Friday I painted them a metallic gold paint, and today I started stenciling them with a bright orange paint. I got 9 our of 13 done today! Back will be sore tomorrow...
Once they're all stenciled I will go over the orange with a brown glaze so they'll look more "antiqued" and less, well, bright orange. It's kind of hard to tell in the picture, but the gold is actually shiny and metallic.

So this is basically my week right now! Painting and stenciling, all day everyday! Very relaxing, but tiring!

Can't wait to share the whole setup when it's put together next week for the actual Dining by Design!

a little teaser...

The firm I work at is participating in SF's Dining by Design event this month (this is our third year!) so today we had a photo shoot at the design center and we mocked up a vignette of our table for this year. This has to be one of my favorite events of the year. Always a lot of prep work and stress, but we work so well as a team that it's always fun and we are always happy with the final product!

Below is our table from 2008's DBD...

Obviously the theme here was "Breakfast at Tiffany's". I loved the retro feel of this design. By the way, my boss custom designed those lovely folding screens which I then painted an gilded (I actually like painting, so it wasn't that bad at all and she helped me gild too). I think there were 14 all-together! My boss even threw in a "Special Thank You" to me on our page in the brochure for the event, so sweet!

Below (and not the best picture, but I couldn't find another one) is our table from 2007. The theme was, oddly enough, the 1960s version of the "The Prisoner", notice the numbered place cards on the table (Number 6: "I am not a number, I am a free man"). What can I say, apparently we were ahead of our time on pop culture trends, we had no idea they would re-make the original 1960s show two years later. I have a feeling if we had chosen this theme this year A LOT more people would know what it was than 2 years ago.

If you're wondering what I painted for this DBD, do you see the checkerboard grass? Well, you can't really see the awesomeness of it, but yes, I painted the checkerboard on it and it was quite a tedious process.