My Very Own Pintrosity.

 Yesterday I was pretty pumped to try something new.  I saw this fantastic buffet on pinterest with a transferred image on it.  I packed the girls in the car, drove all the way to Michaels to buy the image transfer gel, then all the way to Staples to have my image professionally printed off.  (Which only cost $4.88, to my great delight).  I had this perfect blank canvas of a buffet to do it on.



Here is the original pin:

Can't be too hard, right?  I got right to work.  First, I sanded down the top of it (which is later to be stained).  Then I painted the rest in a grey/white mix, which clearly turned out more cream.

Then, I prepared my text, which is printed out in a mirrored image.  I got it from the Graphic's Fairy.  She has thousands of graphics you can download for free.  Pretty cool site.
 

I taped it all on the buffet, matching all the lines up perfectly:
 

I even made sure to make perfect cuts along the edges with a brand new Xacto knife.

Next, I spread the image transfer gel ($25.99 at Michaels) over each page, one page at a time.  The girl at Michaels said she had a least 2 people a week come in to buy the stuff, because of such pins on pinterest.
 

The paintbrush didn't work well, so I just used my finger.

I used a scraper to make sure those puppies were stuck on there good...
 

And let it dry over night.
 

This morning I was counting down the minutes to nap time, so excited was I to carry on with my project.

I took a wet cloth, and began rubbing the paper away.  (As was instructed by the countless pinterest tutorials I had read).
 

It seemed to be going well...
 

All done!  Wouldn't it be sick if it had actually worked!!
 

As I went back to finalize the rubbing-off-of-paper, everything went downhill.  The edges began to peel...
 

There was paper residue completely stuck on that it looked white....
 

And under the image where the gel had dried turned an awful rusty colour.
 

So I spent the rest of my day scraping the dam thing off.
 

I was left with a very beat-up buffet, a messy garage, and a completely wasted day.
 

I'm leaving this piece for Monday.  It's Friday, and I'm declaring it the weekend.

And thoughts / tips / advice as to where I went wrong?