Keeping up with Johanna, Paul and Soldier58

Our Trip to NC and a Huge Thank You!

4/4/2017

Before I tell you about our trip to North Carolina, I want to say thank you. Soldier58 is in the FedEx Small Business Grant Competition so, Paul and asked for your votes through email, Facebook and Instagram and so many of you not only voted but also wrote comments encouraging us and wishing us good luck. The voting ends tomorrow and we will know on April 13th if we made it into the top 100 but we didn’t want to wait too long to let all of you know how grateful we are.

Ok, here's the clunky segue into our North Carolina Trip…one of the encouraging comments we received on our request for votes was from Annie Sloan.

Some people are surprised to know that unlike Aunt Jamima, Annie Sloan is an actual person! Annie’s tight-knit community of Stockists can be found in over 50 countries around the world and we are all members of a private Facebook group that Annie is actively involved on. Paul and I were delighted although not surprised, when Annie posted this lovely comment.

Now, onto North Carolina.

We travel to High Point once a year for a week of training workshops in the Unfolded Chalk Paint® by Annie Sloan Training Studio. Our trainer, Barb spends time with Annie in Oxford and brings back all of Annie’s new techniques to teach to us.

The exciting part is that now, we turn around and teach these same techniques to our customers!

If you haven’t dropped by our Workshop page lately, you’ll notice some changes. We’ve added more advanced technique workshops for our experienced and pro painters as well as a wider variety of workshops that focus on multiple techniques for achieving a specific type of finish. So, for example, in the Distressing workshop you’ll learn several ways to distress, rather than the single way we taught in previous workshops.

I think my favorite new workshop will be Advanced Gilding and Leafing. Look at these amazing finishes…and that beautiful metallic tree design is done in a technique called verre eglomise that’s a French term that translates into “glass gilding.’