More Halloween Decor: The Cheese Dome Cloche

This is what my dining table looked like this afternoon. That's right folks - Miss M is officially a spray paint addict!

I spray painted a bunch of my thrift store find frames with black Krylon. Some of them were plastic, so in the interest of all of them matching I just used the Fusion paint for plastics on all of them. It costs more than the regular paint, but I need them to all be the same finish! I have two more larger oval frames that I've picked up this week as well that need painting. I'm thinking I might make silhouettes of myself and my husband to join the one of the baby I did before. I've run out of room on the wall I was using for these, so I think I'll move them to another, bigger wall in our apartment. Hooray for projects!

Speaking of projects...

I was reading a blog called Decor Chick and came across this super cute idea for an old cheese dome. She found the idea (I love how stuff like this gets spread from blog to blog!) on a blog called House of Hepworths. I had one of those "Why Didn't I Think Of That!" moments. I see those cheese domes at thrift stores all the time, but I would never buy them because wood is porous. Eww. The thought of putting my food where someone else's old food has been and not being able to clean it properly first just skeeves me out BAD. Therefore, they got passed over. Repeatedly.

A few days later, I found this on one of my Goodwill runs. It's a little beat up, but overall, I liked the shape and the size. I figured the little dings gave it character, right? After I scraped some wax off it, it was fine. It came home with me and was set aside to wait.

When I was out junking with my friend Susan last week, I came across a cheese dome. I liked the glass cloche, but the base was cracked and had a big chip missing from it. Although I will admit to having the "but what if I never find another one ever?" thought go through my head, it still ended up getting left on the shelf.

On Thursday night I had to take a class at church, and on my way home I decided to swing by a Goodwill that I had not visited before. There on a bottom shelf, I finally found it - my cheese dome! The base was way beat up with lots of knife scratches and the finish being worn off around the edges, but that didn't matter. As long as the wood was intact the finish was irrelevant. I was going to paint that bad boy!

Oh my goodness, I am so glad none of you had to smell the odor that came out of this thing when I untaped it to clean it the next day. Nasty, nasty, nasty stale old cheese smell, all greasy and rancid. For real. If you click on the photo of it you can see just how nasty and greasy the glass was. I gave the whole thing a good scrub, then when the wood was dried (that really only got wiped down) it got glued to the candle holder with some Gorilla Glue. After that had set, the whole thing got a coat of primer, followed by two coats of black spray paint, and then one coat of a color called oil rubbed bronze. This is a new to me discovery, and I'm in love. It gives just a subtle bit of metallic sheen that's really pretty and a lot more interesting visually than the flat look you can get a lot of times from spray paint. LOVE.

I picked up the little faux pumpkin (it has glitter crackle on it!) and a decorative floral pick at Hobby Lobby today. I didn't use everything that was on the pick, just enough to embellish inside my cloche. Isn't it just the cutest thing? I'm debating making it a tassel now. The stuff to fill the cloche ended up costing the same as the cloche itself did to make!

(That little bottle next to it? More info on that tomorrow!)

Here's the little cheese dome cloche on the dressers in our living room:

What's cool about this is that the pumpkin will look good in there until Thanksgiving, and then I can just change it out for whatever holidays come after! It's not a one trick decor pony! I found a second decanter at a Goodwill today that is keeping my first one company. I will have a bar tray one day with actual booze, LOL! You can see I already made one tassel for the apothecary jar holding Bubba's bribes jelly beans. You can find the directions for basic ones here and better directions, including how to make a twisted cord in the September 2010 issue of Martha Stewart Living.

I am noticing I need to re-do the alphabet strip for the boy too. My work here is never done!