Grain Sack Stripe Bookcase

Is it just me or are grain sack stripes everywhere?? Hey - I'm not complaining! I love them! I was beginning to feel left out though. So, I added a grain sack stripe to the back of a bookcase in my livng room.

I bought this bookcase back in October. It was at Target.com on clearance!! The previous one I had in its place was a ladder type one that just didn't offer much display room. I loved the X detail on this one. I wanted its design to somewhat mimic the Craigslist chairs. Here is the before:

Way too black. It needed something else to make it pop. The back of the bookcase was just two pieces of flimsy board that were screwed in. I removed both pieces, then used some hot glue to actually make them more secured to each other. I planned on wrapping the boards in fabric and didn't want them to fall apart during the process.

I had some leftover canvas from the ottoman I made a slipcover for a couple years ago. It wasn't quite long enough to cover the length of the entire piece, but luckily there is a drawer at the bottom, so it didn't really matter. 

 

Then, I used four pieces of tape to make three lines, one wide, two skinny.

I grabbed a pot of blue sample paint from the never-ending sample paint box....

It was really hard to get the paint to give full coverage, which was fine, because I wanted it to look older. However, as you can see above, I didn't want huge globs of blue here and there. To combat that, when I pulled off the tape, I sanded the paint where I thought there was too much. Yep, I sanded fabric! That was a first for me - and it worked great!

Once it was back up on the bookcase, I wanted to add something a little more unique to it, so I chalked and then painted over our house number.

 

I have terrible handwriting / hand painting skills, please excuse them. And here is the finished result:

I think I still need to play with arranging all my pieces - I've never been very good at that. But overall, I'm liking how its not a black hole of nothing-ness anymore. But, on the other hand, maybe the whole thing just needs to be painted....Hmmm....all I do is create more projects for myself.....And maybe I just need to go ahead and paint my living room walls....hmmm

What do you think?