Since our bathroom is so fresh and clean looking, I thought it needed a new clock. I don’t know how many of you have clocks in your bathrooms, but I’ve always had one in mine. I just don’t know how anyone gets ready to be anywhere on time without a clock in the bathroom. Without it, I’d never get out of the bathroom in time to get anywhere!
Anyway, the search for a clock started even before we started renovating our bathroom. I found this wonderful clock at JoAnn Fabric that would have gone perfectly with my original design idea of green. It had a clear glass frame with fern leaves painted on it in two or three different shades of green. However, once we went with Valspar’s Shoreline Haze color, it just didn’t go, so back it went to JoAnn Fabric.
So while we were renovating, I started looking for another clock… What I really wanted was one of those old Regulator Clocks with pendulum, except I wanted it in white. I figured I’d have to paint it, but I was not willing to pay a ton of money for one. It had to be really cheap. I didn’t find one that was at a price I wanted to pay.
That’s when I decided if I was going to paint a clock anyway, I might as well paint the oak one we already had.
This is what it looked like to start with. I had painted the gold rim around the plastic face black a couple years ago, simply because I didn’t like the gold. Now I wanted to get rid of the black and the oak.
Ugly bathroom with ugly clock
So I sanded it, primed it and painted it. I painted the oak white and painted the rim the wall color. I was really happy with how it looked in the bathroom. It pulled in all the colors and blended well.
Looking better…but still not quite right.
But then as I looked at it day after day, I realized I wanted to dress it up a bit… It needed something to make it a little more unique… So I decided to change the clock face. Now I’ve seen so many of your wonderful projects that you’ve done with clocks using that Cricut machine. Oh! how I would love to have one of those, but I don’t, so I had to think of something else.
The plan I came up with was to find a clock face graphic online, enlarge it to the size I needed (this clock has a 7 1/2″ diameter face, so I could do it on my own printer) and then put it in the clock. Let me tell you, finding a clock graphic that I liked online was NOT as easy as I thought it would be. So many of them had the hands in the graphic, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all.
Finally, I came across this graphic on Little Miss Maggie‘s blog. I had never visited her blog before, but now I’m following her, because she has soooo many incredible ideas. Her friend had used this graphic to cover a huge round coffee table, and it looked wonderful. And I guess after she shared her friend’s table, she had a ton of people asking for the graphic, so she shared it.
Wonderful French clock face graphic
Well, I grabbed it, cleaned it up a bit for my project and printed it. Because I was printing it on regular 8.5×11 printer paper, I used some spray adhesive and glued it to a manila file folder so it wouldn’t be so flexible and possibly droop in the the heat and moisture of the bathroom. Well, that’s not completely true… The paper I used wasn’t white printer paper, it was kind of an ivory parchment color. But the weight was the same as standard printer paper.
Since I didn’t want to take the hands off the clock and put it back together, I cut straight down from the top of the clock to the middle and then taped it back together on the back side. The graphic completely hides the cut.
Here it is all finished, and I’m thrilled with it! It has the French look that I really like. I was really surprised by how easy it was to make the change.
Much better!!
I was also surprised, because Jim noticed it right away. I did it whilst he was at class one evening, and he noticed it as soon as he got home. I wasn’t sure if he would, because I didn’t think it was that big of a change. He kept saying “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” and I kept saying, “Well, I didn’t think you would notice.” But I wasn’t trying to hide the change from him…I just didn’t think he’d be as impressed as he seemed to be. And it turns out I made the cut in the right place, because he had to ask me how I got the new face on it. Yeay for me!!!
So there you have it… Another little piece to our bathroom renovation puzzle. Do you like it as much as I do?
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