Each year the Women’s Health Resource Library has an auction during Milbridge Days. As part of this event, local artisans paint or decorate items that will be offered in a silent auction. This year, the silent auction theme is “Paint Outside the Box.” Paul built a dozen lidded boxes that we distributed to area artisans. From there, they could turn this box into whatever they could envision. When we fell short and artist, I adopted a box.

This is what the original box looked like with a hinged top. It’s 24″ x 16″ x 16″.

I asked Paul to make me a lightly larger lid for my box. He fashioned some cleats on the bottom of the lid so would stay on the box without hinges or sliding off. From Amazon, I purchased wooden legs  to raise the box off the floor. As I’m not much of a painter, my thoughts turned to decoupage – which I have zero experience with! I wondered about using a nautical chart to cover the box. Paul dug out a couple of old charts that cover the coast of Maine. While they were so cool with great colors, they were too small to fit one chart across a panel.

Pinterest was a great resource where I discovered decoupaging with napkins or tissue paper. In my search for fun tissue paper I found a website that will custom print your tissue paper. Oh, boy, the creativity started flowing. I pondered a scene with my birds and critters. Maybe a floral themed box. But then I was back to the nautical theme when I discovered that one could download full-size nautical charts from NOAA.

Northeast Harbor, Grand Manan, Tibbetts Narrows, Machias Bay, Blue Hill and Frenchman’s Bay, Schoodic and the Gulf of Maine are the charts I downloaded and had printed on tissue paper. My order arrived, and I realized that in my enthusiasm, I had ordered the wrong size tissue paper! Back online I went to order another set to the tune of $50+, and I waited. In the meantime, I primed the box and experimented with one of the wrong sized pieces of tissue on a spare piece of wood.

When new 20×30″ tissue paper arrived, I was ready to go. I positioned the sheets to my favorite part of the chart fit on the panel. With the chart flat on the panel, I set a book on one side of the chart to hold it in place while I peeled the other half up and added the decoupage medium. Then I slowly smoothed it out as best I could before tackling the other half. I took my straight edge and my rotary cutter and trimmed the edges. This was not particularly easy to accomplish neatly on the slippery surface. As you can see, there were lots of wrinkles. I gently worked them with my fingers, popping some of the larger bubbles with a pin. When it dried, many of the wrinkles were still there, but much less pronounced.

With painters tape, I marked off nice clean edges and painted them with robin’s egg colored paint I had leftover from another project.

There’s the almost finished product.

I’m now working on finishing my table with as many coats of water-based polyurethane as I can manage by next weekend.

I like this little table so much that I’d prefer to keep it, but it will go up for auction. The silent auction for this and 11 over “Paint Outside the Box” boxes starts on Friday, July 26 at 1 pm. The auction is open from Friday 1-6pm and then again on Saturday the 27th until 1:30 pm. In addition to these boxes, there are over 100 other items from area businesses that we will offer in raffles (including a gift basket from Downeast Thunder Farm). The event is at the Seaworthy Event Center on Main Street and is part of the Milbridge Days festivities. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come and help support the Women’s Health Resource Library!

UPDATE 7/27/19

I couldn’t be more excited! My “Navigating Maine” table brought in the top bid in our fundraising event today. There were painters there with much more talent than me, but my nautical theme seemed to resonate. Whew. I’m glad that’s over!