Do Not Try This at Home

Or
How My Life Serves as a Warning to Others PART ONE

So I had this great idea; I would make my own paint! How hard could it be? Peasants and pioneers did it, right? So I searched the web for info and found some recipes for milk paint and some others I'd never heard of. OH GOODY!! Here I go! And here is the test subject:

My first batch of milk paint was not so successful. There were coverage issues. I wanted white but didn't know what to use as a pigment. More milk?

I decided to switch direction and make brown paint. What better for pigment than instant coffee? Well, lots of things, apparently, but I digress.

I diluted some coffee, added it to my mixture with a little olive pigment left over from fabric painting and the paint thinned out to an olive green glaze. SURPRISE!

Before and after:

Argh. It was pretty, but really, I wanted white. So, enter:

Yeah, I threw in the towel .... for the moment. This was the first time I'd used the canned version of milk paint so I was actually pretty excited. But it came with its own learning curve.

The milk paint fell off my home-made glaze. Fell. Off. I had to sand the entire chair. Again. And I painted it again. This time the purchased milk paint chipped and crazed but didn't actually LEAP off the chair. It was lovely.

And finally, the perfect chippy white chair before

  and after .....

Close up of the new seat - an antique canvas cement bag.

And one last word of advice: do not spray polyurathane on milk paint. Just don't. When you are least expecting it, it will LEAP off the piece of furniture and scramble for cover. It will especially time this for when you want to take pictures. And then you get to sand again. Then you apply wax like you should have from the beginning.

Am I finished trying to make paint? NO. Certainly not. I have purchased white pigment. I am woman hear me roar.

To be continued.........