There's tiger blood in my veins...

Oh, Charlie Sheen.  Whatever happened to you, after your immensely entertaining (and somewhat sad) tailspin and tour?  Though, really, this post has nothing to do with Charlie Sheen, Hollywood or even wild binges.  We're far more boring here at the Handyverger home.  The highlight of my weekend was tearing up the pink monstrosity in the master bedroom and exposing glorious, glowing hardwood underneath.  Expect a post on that soon, but for now, I wanted to show you the joys of Rub N Buff.

The wonderful Sammy at Renew Redo has a thing for it, and it's thanks to her that I actually bought some at Michael's a couple weeks ago and played around with it.  Tiffany has perfected the technique of coating entire pieces of furniture with the stuff, but since I didn't want to go the highly volatile compound route (I'm pretty sure they contain things like toluene), with an asthmatic husband and an asthmatic cat around, I just played around with it on a small scale.

The first project I tried with Rub N Buff was a bird that I found at Michael's, along with Rub N Buff from the very same.  The bird started its life out as pure white, shiny ceramic, and using Grecian Gold and Patina Rub N Buff, I transformed him into this:

I had expected more of a solid color finish, but instead, I ended up with a very pretty shabby chic .. chick.  The gold has a very pretty shimmer to it, when the light hits it.

The next project was a larger pitcher.  Same material, on clearance at Michael's.  

In the detail, the gold really comes out - I love the area in the center, where it's almost iridescent.  This one is worth clicking on to enlarge.

Finally, I played around with turning some plastic children's animals into something shiny, inspired by all the funky brightly painted animals I'm seeing around lately.

Enlarge this one - gorgeous sheen on his little nose.  No Charlie Sheen pun intended, there.

As you can see, the cats like to help.  This is why this project was done in a well-ventilated basement area, with the door shut and cats locked OUT!  Getting the tiger to be a uniform color was particularly challenging, since rubbing the Rub N Buff into the tiny crevices took a lot of finesse and generous application of Rub N Buff.  

Finally, and this is sort of my favorite of the projects, since I adore rats, are plastic Halloween rats turned into glam ratues.  Yes.  I just made up a word for a statue of a rat.  I'll put them after the jump, in case rats gross you out.

Once again, you can see that my cats like to help.  But take a closer look at the rats.  Once I figured out how challenging it is to get the Rub N Buff into tiny crevices, I used that to my advantage to create a very aged look.  One rat was white (the copper/patina looking one) and the other was black, which both worked out beautifully for the look I was trying to achieve: metal statues that had been sitting outdoors for years, getting rained and snowed on.

My husband has placed a moratorium on Rub N Buffing things.  Good thing, because I keep looking at things and thinking "Ooh, that would look pretty..."

Winning!

(Also, linked to the following...)

Centsational Girl's Spring Craft Party