Why is it that I always seem to have issues with TRAYS? Remember this fail? This new fail is much bigger & more laughable. More time went into it, and it's totally not fixable either. Giant bag of whoops. I've had this post on my to-do list for a couple of months actually, but kept going back & forth about whether I should share it or not, and/or if I could make it work. But alas, I've come to the conclusion that I need to just let it be & tell you all about it & be done with it. So sad, but here goes...
Maybe you have seen this lovely bottle cap tray. I found it on Pinterest a long long time ago. It was actually one of the very first things I pinned once I received access to the site. It was so pretty, and looked so easy, that I deemed it done & started collecting bottle caps. I collected & collected & collected. I had family & friends collect for me. For about 6 months, until I finally had enough, hooray!
Then, because I was feeling to lazy to go to the Salvation Army to find a used tray (I guess?) I decided to just BUILD my own tray. This was the key mistake. I built the tray out of scrap wood leftover from some other projects. Easy, just a flat bottom & four sides tacked on. I filled in cracks with wood dough. Checked to make sure the caps fit properly, and got it spray-painted white.
Once the tray was painted, I separated the bottle caps evenly & painted them green, blue, and white with spray paint as well. Pretty colors! Then I was ready to rock & roll.
This is where the disaster began. I laid down my caps in no real order, then got my acrylic water ready. (Acrylic water is most often used in fake floral arrangements, so look for it near the floral stuff in your craft store. It's not super cheep, but it's good stuffs!) I poured the acrylic water over the bottle caps in the tray & left it to set, feelin' pretty proud of myself. A half hour later, I hear Brendan yelling from the other room about the dining room table being covered in something that the tray is leaking! WHA-???
Yea, so apparently I didn't wood-dough the cracks well enough, and that acrylic water was sneaky & pushed it's way out. I grabbed it & put it outside on the back patio while we frantically wiped up sticky acrylic water from the dining room table. Oops.... my bad. The table now has an odd sheen to it... that stuff totally doesn't come up all the way. Good thing we have another table out in the garage that I'm hoping to refinish soon :-)
So I left the tray outside, hoping that it would retain some of the acrylic water... enough to hold my little caps in & that it'd still work out. Unfortunately, this was way early spring... it was windy & cold out there. Pieces of debris were flying around & landing in my still wet & sticky acrylic water. Leaving everything looking dirty. Some of the acrylic water did stay in the tray, and the bottle caps are secure, but it was riddled with random pieces of dirt & sticks & dust. Plus the acrylic is not evenly distributed at all. It's just majorly unattractive in so many ways.
Ok, so it doesn't look SO bad in the picture. You can't really see how those little pieces of dirt stuff are totally stuck in their place.
Ugh, see, not good AT ALL. It would have been pretty cool though... if only... So, lessons learned?
1) Don't put liquid into a container with holes or cracks in it (duh)
2) Don't let sticky stuff dry outside on a windy day (double duh)
3) Buy $1 trays from Salvation Army instead of making your own out of scrap wood. It's easier & would have been way more successful.
So that's that... Go ahead & laugh, it's okay.
Tray fails: 2. Sarah: 0.
I will be linking this post up to these awesome sites.
