In our little town in Northern CA, Dollar Tree is the most “happening” store around.  Don’t feel too sorry for me,  I can be in Target, Lowes or Michaels or pretty much anything else, in less than 15 minutes.  It’s all good.  Regularly, though, I find myself perusing our local Dollar Tree.   Have you ever noticed that they seem to carry a lot of ceramic figurines?  Lots.  Figurines rarely excite me, but I did find these a while back:

Aren’t you just digging the look?  Yeah, me neither!  At the time I had been researching chalk paint and wanted to try to see if it really does stick to everything.  Guess what?  It does!  I purposely didn’t sand or scuff up the super shiny finish and the paint still adhered perfectly.  My chalk paint recipe was pretty basic:

I know that you all know how to paint, so I won’t bore you with all of the details, but I will note that instead of using brush strokes I just pounced the brush up and down. I did a couple of heavy coats.  I wanted this pair to look like painted iron that had chipped a bit. Once the paint was dry, I gently sanded them.  Just a buff with a little wax (to be honest, I just used regular Minwax) and these little birdies were done.

Yep, you can see a touch of the original colors peeking through if you squint really hard, but I kind of like that.

Not bad for a couple of bucks and about 10 minutes of my time, don’t you think?  Hmmm, maybe it’s time to hit up the ceramic figurine section at Goodwill.