When Bad Things Happen to Good Transfers

Picked this little dresser up off Facebook Market Place. It met all of my criteria. It needed to be cheap ($35), close by, and ugly. Since it was previously white and pink and not the nice shade of pink and in my town, it all worked out. Don't believe me on the pink thing do you? Alright, hold tight.

The owner had it stored in the garage and it had kinda picked up a bit of a funk smell to it as well. The first chore was cleaning it off & spraying it with Lysol. I'm not entirely sure that actually worked or it just aired out on it's own. Anyhow, the intermediate step was to get rid of that pink which really wasn't all that easy to cover, even using gray chalk board paint.

About three coats later, it had a nice gray tone to it. Sadly the drawers weren't all that excited about closing firmly so after the paint job there was a lot of sanding to get things to fit happily back together. I then ordered the Prima Transfer "On a Voyage" from Amazon. I really was excited about the ship and the compass and I thought with the curved top it would look like a sea chest...or at least have that theme.

Since this was in the very middle of Covid, shipping of the transfer took forever and even was delayed. Finally, I got my hands on it and that very evening began working on getting it transferred onto this dresser. The first piece went on really well. The second which had the ship was horrible! I've seen transfers pick up the paint instead of transferring onto the piece, which is bad paint adhesion. This was very different. It was like the bottom layer of the transfer that was sticky went on but the top layer with the image refused to budge. I think to be honest it was old and I learned subsequently that it had been discontinued. If I had ordered from a distributor, I could have asked for a new one or at least gotten my money back. Amazon wanted the whole product back and two sections of it were already on the dresser.

 I kept at it and it turned out to mainly just be the second drawer up that didn't work out so well. My options were to order another transfer and sand the drawer back down or come up with plan B. I decided I wanted roses and to make this look like the inside of a trunk. Enter a second transfer. This one was a water slide transfer and required the whole piece be mainly finished.

After a bunch of brown glaze rubbed on, gold paint dabbed in various places and then a coat of clear, I was ready for the blue rose water slide. That can be found on Ebay and was shipped super quick and worked effortlessly. It definitely made me much less sad about the places that didn't transfer so well. There is so much detail in this piece now!

I'm not sure yet what I'm doing with this piece. It's up for sale, but mainly because I made it for fun and to pass the time during the no fun Covid. Might be a donation piece, we'll see.