Phew!

Don't you LOVE it when you finish a project you've been putting off??

Our friends Rod & Cynthia lost their beloved chocolate lab, Annabelle, about a year and a half ago. Not long after, Cynthia showed me a plaque she had been given at work, and asked me if I thought a picture of Annabelle could be decoupaged onto it.

She apparently thought I knew about such things. That was her first mistake.

Her second mistake: thinking she would be getting it back anytime soon. :)

Cynthia had a specific photograph of Annabelle in mind. Years earlier, a professional photographer had seen Annabelle and fallen in love with her (not so unusual, if you met Annabelle), and asked Rod & Cynthia if she could photograph Annabelle in exchange for some of the prints. They readily agreed, and the photographer used the images to make products for sale.

(One day Rod & Cynthia were in a gift shop on Bailey's Island when Cynthia spied a magnet with Annabelle's picture on it. She exclaimed to the owner of the shop that that was her dog on that magnet! The owner agreed that it was indeed a chocolate lab like Annabelle, who was with them in the shop in her role of service dog. Cynthia had a hard time convincing her that it really was HER dog in the photograph, but she finally did. And she bought the magnet.)

I took the plaque and the photograph and told her I would try. The first order of business was to get copies made of the photograph - lots - because I had a feeling this would be a trial-and-error kind of project. Once again, I was right.

I won't bore you with all the products and procedures I tried, or how many times I had to strip the plaque down and start over when those things failed. I'd rather forget all that myself. I kept wondering who I could ask that would know how to do this, but kept coming up empty-handed, even after scouring the internet.

I was talking to the owner of our local hardware store a while back and all of a sudden it occurred to me that this might be a person who knows a thing or two about finishing wood. She did! She made a couple of suggestions, and I chose the product she said had gotten the best feedback from customers - a two-part epoxy kit.

I was so excited - until I got home and read the instructions inside the package. It seemed way too complicated, and way too easy to mess up. It took me a couple of months to finally work up the courage to try. As it turns out, it wasn't nearly as difficult as I was thinking it would be. That is a rarity in my experience...I find things are usually way harder than I expect them to be. :)

Not that this process was without incident.

I had the plaque resting on top of an upside-down clay flowerpot so the edges would be exposed during the pouring of the epoxy, which dripped off onto wax paper placed underneath the pot. What I didn't realize is that the epoxy ran underneath the plaque (because our floor isn't level) until it reached the flowerpot, at which time it spread around the entire circumference of said flowerpot. That realization hit me the next day, when I picked up the plaque so I could remove and discard the wax paper.

The flowerpot (and the wax paper) came up with the plaque, in one solid mass.

I knew I was going to have to sand the epoxy drips off the edges of the plaque on the underside. I didn't know I was going to have to bust a flowerpot and use a hammer and chisel to try to remove chunks of clay stubbornly cemented to the underside of the plaque, before breaking out the Dremel and attaching a metal file to finish removing the clay and the huge amount of epoxy cementing it to the plaque.

Anyway, it's done and I couldn't be happier. I love, love, love the smooth glass-like feel of the epoxy finish - you can't even tell the photograph is sitting on top of the wood plaque, it's so even. This is exactly what I wanted it to look like.

Here's hoping it's exactly what Rod & Cynthia wanted it to look like! If they even remember giving it to me, that is.