edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
[personal profile] edenfalling
My mom and I arranged my birthday gift to her several months in advance, to the point where she and I went out to buy supplies for it together.

See, she and my dad inherited six pictures from my paternal grandmother, which were nicely mounted behind glass in fake-gilt frames... only the gold paint was badly faded and flaking. So Mom asked me to repaint the frames, because it's a tedious and annoying job she didn't really have the time to deal with.

For various and sundry reasons (some more justifiable than others) I haven't really had the time to deal with it either, but I am finally getting around to it. Tonight I took out the first picture, laid it on some old newspaper I acquired specifically for this project, carefully applied masking tape to the glass right up against the inner edge of the frame (I can't just pop the picture out, because that would require removing the backing and the hanging wire, and neither Mom nor I wanted to deal with putting all that back together), sanded off as much of the old paint as I could (plus a couple pieces of ancient Scotch tape, ugh), and applied a first coat of new gold acrylic paint.

I am going to leave the second coat until tomorrow evening, but now that I know what I'm doing I think that will go faster, as will the other paintings. I don't know if I'll get all six done by the time I drive back to NJ on Saturday the 31st, but I should certainly have three or four ready to transport, and anything I don't finish before the new year I can just keep around in a corner for Mom to pick up in February when she and Dad come up for my birthday.

(We have a family tradition of going out for a fancy restaurant dinner on people's birthdays, though we usually follow it with some kind of homebaked dessert. In my case, we also usually attend a classical music event of some sort. That started because I kept getting cheap tickets to local concerts through my church's service auction, but then one year my parents were all, 'Why don't we go see the Met Live in HD performance of Rusalka; your local cinema is broadcasting it that weekend!' and I said sure, why not, so the classical-music-event-on-Liz's-birthday-weekend thing has apparently taken on a life of its own. And you know, as birthday traditions go, I am pretty okay with this one. *wry*)

Anyway, I think I will need to buy a second bottle of the gold paint, but I can do that on Wednesday after work, since I will be at the mall for unrelated reasons (*cough* buying bras and socks at Target *cough*) and can hit up Michaels on the same trip.

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Date: 2016-12-28 04:38 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wistfulmemory.livejournal.com
I am a huge fan of concerts and plays as gifts. I'm not the greatest at coming up with specific items that make good gifts, but I am good at finding concerts and plays my family/friends like, and then I buy two tickets so I can go with them, and a fun time is had by all of us.

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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

May 2025

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