Malenka Originals

We’re extending our hours from now until the end of summer, giving you a bit more time to pop down to Malenka Originals during the week. Starting today the shop will stay open until  8pm on Thursdays. Shop hours are: Wed: 10-5 Thurs: 10-8 Fri: 10-5 Sat: 10-5 See you soon…      

End of April and I have no finished pieces to show for it! If you’ve been in the shop lately, you’ll have seen about 6 (or more) pieces in progress over the last month…very slow progress. This has been a fairly odd month, especially as I was only in my shop for half of it. [...]

Has March been a whirlwind for everyone? Perhaps it’s The Thaw. Everyone is starting to wake-up after a long winter’s rest, and we’re feeling like getting out, and getting busy on all the projects we had no energy for during the winter. Sound familiar? I actually managed to do several pieces in March, but they [...]

My little paint shelf sees a lot of action…   I can get over 100 cans on there. It was the perfect kijiji buy a couple years ago for $15. I painted it in Pure White with Provence on the insides. Everyday I re-stock the shelves, move paint cans around, customers grab their favourite colours…hundreds [...]

Blue is my default. I don’t know why, but it’s the first colour I always want to paint a piece. It’s so obvious that an artist in my area has stopped into my shop on several occasions and proclaimed, “you have too much blue in here!” But she’s a green person. It seems you can [...]

There is a jaw-droppingly beautiful armoire in Annie Sloan’s book Creating the French Look that I’ve been fixated on for a long time. It’s the most flipped-to page in my display copy.  Anyone who mentions ‘Country Grey’ is promptly met with me grabbing the book and introducing them to said armoire. It’s hard to really [...]

So, sometimes things do go as planned. I’m loving using Miss Mustard Seed’s milk paint. As I wrote about before, I was really taken by MMS’s new technique with milk paint to achieve The Chippy. I did a chippy piece just before Christmas that I was really happy with. This was a really old antique [...]

2012 has been a big year here at Malenka Originals. Although I discovered Chalk Paint™ in 2011, it was in 2012 that it really grabbed hold of me. Not many days went by without picking up a paint brush! When trying to find a good post to mark the year that was, I realised it’s [...]

The last few months have been a wild ride. The Malenka Originals shop opened 2-1/2 months ago, and in that time hundreds of new faces have come through my door. Most stay for a chat, come back again, send pictures of projects, and many have joined in at my workshops. And such fantastic people they’ve [...]

Annie Sloan’s new book is here, and let me tell you, some magical things start to happen when you bring together a group of fabulous ladies, all the gorgeous Chalk Paint colours, and a stack of Work Books… Which is what we did at Malenka Originals this week. Here’s a look at all the playing [...]