What is Shabby Chic?
Shabby chic is a style of interior design where furniture and decor ostensibly show signs of wear and tear and age. The style started in the UK and evokes the style of old large country houses, being elegant, bohemian, romantic and vintage at the same time.
What to use on your vintage projects:
Use and abuse of motifs of flowers, birds, butterflies… and more flowers. Choose distressed pastel colors such as antique rose, lavender, mint, white, gray, butter and pale blue. Also, swirls and twirls galore!
The projects below were all originally published on my old website.
Vintage Bird Cage
It was originally just a white metal cage. I added the ribbons, paper and foam flowers, peacock feathers and the cute little bird 🙂
Craft Organizer Cabinet with scrap fabric
This wooden cabinet was sold without any finish, just like the picture below. I fell in love with it because it had 14 drawers in 3 different sizes! It was perfect to keep all my paper punches, scrapbooking embellishments, paints, buttons, ribbons and the like.
I painted it white and covered the drawers with coordinating patchwork fabric and PVA glue.
Wooden Boxes
I LOVE creating these boxes! They are so cute, useful and a perfect canvas to try different ideas, textures and materials. I covered most of them with scrapbooking paper and used lots of buttons, die cuts, ribbons, lace, stamps, thread, doilies, stickers, gems… the list goes on and on…
Giant Card
You can’t really tell just by looking at the picture, but the card below is actually size A3 (297 x 420 mm or 11.7 x 16.5 in). It was a goodbye card to my former manager, so we needed plenty of space so everybody could leave her a message.
I used my Silhouette Cameo, scrapbooking paper, buttons, paint, vellum, doilies, spray paint and white paint to distress the borders.
Karen Tiemy 