Well, here we are. Already into July! Where has time gone? I don’t feel like I have accomplished much yet! We have been camping and are planning another few days away in a couple of weeks. But my luggage wasn’t ready. Actually, the only luggage I had were some pieces my husband had recieved from work and they all had the company name on them. So cute and fashionable(sarcasm)!! Then I remembered I had  a suitcase I used to keep scrapbooking stuff in before I moved it into the big desk in Lauren’s room. I bought it years ago at a yard sale and it’s red, which is not my favorite color, but I figured I might as well do something with it. Maybe I could make it a little cuter! I looked around on Pinterest, but the only suitcases were vintage ones. Yeah, this is vintage…1990’s vintage! 🙂

Plain Jane

Since the suitcase is red, I decided to go nautical. I tried to think what design would work and settled on an anchor. I found a design I liked on the computer and printed it out, but it was too big. I shrunk it down and printed again. This is where the mistakes began. I taped the pieces of my anchor together and then proceeded to cut out the wrong one! I cut out the bigger one instead! You see, in order to save paper, I printed out the smaller anchor on the back of the larger one. Maybe not such a good idea. 😦 Well, I pieced it together as best I could and figured I would just add in the missing parts. First I tried rubbing chalk on the back of the anchor and then tracing over the design on the front. Failure! Tried again, this time tracing the front with a pencil instead of chalk. Double failure! My only other choice was to cut out my mutilated anchor as best as I could and then trace around it onto the suitcase. I stuffed the suitcase with a couple of boxes and put a large scrapbook into the front pocket before starting the tracing to give me a hard surface..I used a black paint pen to trace. It actually came out pretty good! Surprise! I am no artist or painter, so this is pretty good for me! Now I started coloring it in. I started with a navy blue paint pen. It worked okay, but didn’t really cover very well. I used white paint and a stiff bristled brush for the white rope. After it had dried, I knew I needed something different for the blue. I used the same fabric paint I used when I painted my Skechers, Tulip Fabric Paint, Marine Blue. This turned out much better! I let it dry overnight and then added another coat of each color in the morning. After that dried, I added the black outline again and the details to the rope. I am actually pretty impressed at how well this turned out! I did find a small anchor stamp at Michaels and tried stamping some small anchors in blue and white on the top pockets. They didn’t turn out very well, so I only did about 8. I outlined them with sharpie and called it good. I think my luggage and I are ready to go now! My husband can use his own! 😉