At one
point, I was getting so carried away with artistic fervour that I was basically
painting everything that stood still long enough. (Though not quite to the
extent of my former housemate James – I woke up one morning to find a live
mouse in the humane trap in the kitchen, with a note taped to it saying “Do not
release – gone to buy paint”. But I digress.)
It started
life as just plain blue, but if you’re going to paint your washing machine, you
have to go all out, you know? No point going to Woodstock but not getting stoned and dancing
naked on a table. And, well, for someone who wears fluoro green and gold shoes,
nothing is too patriotic.
My first
stop was the Union Jack. I blew the dust off my measuring tape and figured out
the dimensions of the machine lid, then found an image online, pasted it into a
Publisher document and sized it to the same dimensions as the lid. That told me
how wide the stripes needed to be, so I chalked them out and then masking taped
the edges of the lines.
Pretend
this photo is of the tape for the white, not the red. You get the idea.
It’s easier
to paint half on top of the tape, because if you’re running the brush along the
edges then the paint is more likely to work its way underneath.
While I
painted, instead of singing along with my Banjo Party record like I usually do
while crafting, I had a chat with my conscience that went something like this:
INNER
VOICE: So, hey, remember that time in second year when you failed your open
book exam because you watched movies all night and showed up on no sleep with
no notes?
ME: Yeah,
so?
INNER
VOICE: You have an open book exam in two days, Rach. Have you written any notes
yet?
ME:
….What’s your point exactly?
INNER
VOICE: Oy vey.
After more
layers of paint than the Golden
Gate Bridge,
I repeated the measure-tape-paint process with the red stripes. (I found them
harder to measure on the computer since they’re slanted, so I printed them and
went old-school ruler on them.)
Embarrassingly,
the process for the stars was much the same: measuring the front of the washing
machine, sizing the Southern Cross and printing the stars individually. If I’d
tried to paint them freehand they would have come out looking more like
white-capped waves, so I stuck the print-outs on poster board and cut them out
with a Stanley
knife to make a stencil.
In
hindsight, I would have moved all the stars up a few centimetres, because even
though they’re perfectly even, you can only really tell that they’re even when you’re sitting on the ground. I don’t
spend much time on the floor of my laundry room, especially since nobody’s
vacuumed in there since we moved in.
Now my only
problem is how to hide it when Nan comes to
visit. Suggestions?
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