Super Girlie, Extra Frilly, Deluxe Tea Party Table

As you know I have been working on Little Miss’s room, the walls have been painted, crates have been covered and the curtains have been made, but we needed a table. A special table for having tea parties and playing with all our little toys.

I have had this table for several years, it was rescued from the curb during city wide clean up. Sadly I forgot to take a before picture, but basically it was a stained wood table that was all banged up with several scuffs and stains. I started by cleaning it and scraping the gum, yes chewing gum, off the bottom. I set the nails back in, patched a few small holes with wood filler and lightly sanded the whole thing. Then I painted it brown using a latex “paint pod” (a little jar of paint used to sample colors from Ace Hardware). I thought it was kind of funny that I painted a brown table brown, but it is a special shade of brown.

I took some of the fabric leftover from the curtains to Office Max and had them make color copies of it for me. (BTW, the copies are awesome, you can see the grain of the fabric.) I knew I wanted to decoupage the individual flower motifs onto the table top and I didn’t want to deal with little strings from fraying fabric edges. I cut out a generous amount of flowers. I cut fairly close to the edges, but what made this turn out so well was that my base paint so closely matched the fabric background color. Using Mod Podge I applied all the flowers to the top of the table randomly. It looked great, but why stop there? it needed more. I thought about adding rhinestones around the edge or some puff paint “pearls” to the top, but decided that I wanted it to be smooth for drawing and writing. I decided it needed a tutu, a pink sparkly one! I bought a roll of sparkle tulle (25 yards) and, using my super special cording foot, zigzagged over yarn onto the tulle. If you make a lot of gathers a foot like this is the way to go, I won’t ever make gathers with two rows of basting again!!! Plus the yarn feeds through a hole in the foot and straight under the needle. I only have to worry about keeping the fabric straight. It took a while to gather it all up, but it came out perfectly puffy. I have it pinned into place because I want to finish the table with super glossy top coat and I have to have a non-humid day to apply that correctly. Yeah, a non-humid day in August, ha!

Now we’re going to need some chairs.