Reverb 10 Prompt: Make

While I find the Reverb 10 prompts thought-provoking, I have not posted my responses to any of them yet, mainly because I am still mulling them over.

Here’s one that I can blab about, however:

The Reverb 10 prompt for December 6th, 2010 came from Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

Here are a few things that other bloggers doing Reverb 10 recently made:

Jyllian made the “still beating heart of your long dead lover,” which sounds Poe-tically perfect for Halloween. Still not sure what that is? Check it out!

Paula made beautiful portraits of birds and people.

Kyra made a very yummy sounding leek quiche, accompanied by a beautiful photo of steamed leeks.

Grace made a Facebook page for her blog.

Gwen made a videogram for Gretchen Rubin.

As for me, I gold-leafed an old bathtub. While it isn’t the last thing I made, it was a lot of fun:

My boyfriend has a do-it-yourself streak a mile wide. He’s the one who proposed heading to Old Home Supply in Fort Worth in search of the perfect bathtub for our little guest bathroom.

See the photo above? That’s our diamond in the rough nestled between all that wrought iron, a bike, and other cast off items. Luckily, a couple of guys wandered by and helped us load the tub into our car.

Next, I picked out the perfect set of cute cast iron feet for the tub. I found some ones that resemble eagle talons. As you can see from the photos, we buffed off all the years of rust on them, before priming them in pink. Later on, I gold-leafed them, which was really fun!

The tub is stamped with its manufacture date on the bottom. I have it written down somewhere, but I can’t find it right now. I think it was October 11, 1935, though. I do remember joking that our tub is a Libra!

Even after we scrubbed the tub, it remained stained up and gross looking, definitely not a place you would want to soak your naked self. So my boyfriend sanded the outside and painted it a bright white. We then primed the outside of the tub in pink and – you guessed it – gold-leafed it. After that, the bf toned down the bright gold with a brownish glaze, which adds a nice dimension to it. We’re keeping the feet a bright gold, though, for contrast.

A dear friend of ours thinks the tub project is pretty stupid. His reasoning is that we could be done with the whole bathroom project if we had bought a fiberglass tub and tiled the room with linoleum.

That is true, of course, but where is the fun in doing that? As I mentioned in this post, my boyfriend once told me that, “We don’t have to do anything normal if we don’t want to. We can be happy eccentrics and do what we please.” He was referring to our friend’s negative reaction to our gold-leafed bathtub when he said that.

So, yes, fixing up our guest bathroom is taking us longer than it could if we followed someone else’s recipe, but we are having fun doing it our own way. I learned how to gold leaf, which is a blast! In fact, I’m a bit like Christopher Walken’s infamous SNL character now, except instead of a fever for cowbell, I’ve got a fever for gold-leafing. I think it would be fun to gold-leaf a pair of sandals, among other things.

Another thing I learned from this bathroom project is how to cut stone tiles. We have a really cool saw that sprays water the whole time you use it, and cuts through stone like butter. (Imagine a Long Island accent with the word, “butter,” kinda like, “buttah.”) I never knew how fun it is to cut rock. You’ve really got to try it sometime. It’s very satisfying!