Queenie Eileenie: A Reflection on Numbers

I’m in that funky group of homeowners that think whimsy beats out traditional in certain situations. Take our mailbox, for example. There were u-g-l-y house numbers on the side when we bought the house 10 years ago. About 5 years ago, I decided to take those off and come out with something on my own. I like the outside of the house to somehow give a peek at the personality of the people living inside. John wanted me to do something in purple and gold but he lost that fight after I told him that someone would rip it down. I plant purple and yellow pansies at the mailbox and front door every fall and that’s enough for my Tiger fan.

I decided to do a tile mosaic of our street numbers and used black, copper and cream tiles with cream grout. I never took a picture of it, but it did the trick and held up for 5 years…until bits and pieces fell off this harsh winter. So, back to the drawing board. Here’s what I started out with:

I bought this raw wood base from Hobby Lobby and decided it was going to reflect my love of black and white checks and a color in our living room…cinnabar. I didn’t didn’t take pictures of the first steps (sorry!) but started by spraying the raw wood with Binzer 123 primer and them painted the raised molding a cream/white with a little gray. Then I measures off for the black squares and painted them using black, dark brown and beige. Yep! I do like my Mackenzie-Childs and use their technique except for the colors of the interior as the accent colors instead of their traditional blue, gray and yellow accent paints.

I decided to cross hatch the cinnabar color on the surface and went over this three times until you couldn’t see the white primer underneath. I added a wine colored paint to the cinnabar paint to give it more interest.

Next comes the stenciling of the street numbers using a white wax carbon paper underneath my computer generated numbers

I am using gold leaf for the numbers, so the sizing is painted on first.

Almost finished here with the painting…you have to let the gold leaf sizing dry to a tacky finish before adding the leafing. I used Mona Lisa Sizing and gold leaf.

I didn’t take pictures during the gold leafing stage…it gets kind of messy! I then sprayed the front and back of the sign with an indoor/outdoor polyurethane to protect it from the weather. Last step is to outline the numbers with a black oil based paint pen. This should be done last because the polyurethane will make the black oil paint run if sprayed on top.