Linnéa: My husband had a very nice surprise for me when I came back from Sweden: an old, broken bar on wheels!! He really knows what´s gets me going;-) I started by fixing the wheels and stabilizing the roof and the posts that are holding it. Reattached the door and put some extra nails here and there. I really wanted to try to make my own milk paint after seeing how good it came out for Caroline in her last rocking chair project. I think I mixed 3 different recipes and came up with one that fits the ingredients that I had at home! And after the first brushstrokes I felt so satisfied, it came out so beautiful!! For the roof, I used a white chalk paint with some ounces of green pigment powder. Then we went to buy some good smelling herbs and flowers to put inside the boxes and I hung a light strand in the ceiling for the nights.
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Caroline: A friend found this rocking chair in pieces in a dumpster and told me "Do what ever you want" so of course I wanted to try something different. On many blogs and pages from the US about up-cycling furniture they write about milk paint. Milk paint is probably the oldest painting technique in the world. It has been used in cave paintings and apparently the ancient Egyptians used it in their tombs. Now it is used mostly on furniture to create an antique look or as some call it - "shabby chic". Now I do not really like "shabby chic" painting, I mean I do like an old piece of furniture with old paint peeling off it, but I want it real, a real old piece of furniture with a story and five layers of paint that have been put on by different owners over the years. The stuff one can buy today, that has been painted and then sand papered to look old, does not feel real to me. But that is just me, I know a lot of people love the style - or else you wouldn't be able to buy it in any furniture store. Besides, I am still experimenting with different techniques and styles and I want to learn more about all kinds of paints so this rocking chair became my "shabby chic" victim. Milk paint is a very very cool paint. I like that it is nearly completely environmental friendly (depending on what pigment you use) and that one can make unusual effects with it like spidery cracks and flaky paint. My problem was that one cannot buy ready mixed milk paint powder in this country, of course. So I would have to make it from scratch. It is the protein in milk, casein, which binds pigments to wood and creates the texture of paint and to get casein from milk one can curdle it by using lemon or vinegar which will concentrate the protein. However I was lucky enough to find casein in powdered form in my favorite paint store (www.pigmentim.co.il) so I avoided one messy step. I mixed the casein powder with water, borax and pigments in a 2 day process that I won't describe here. Then I painted two layers of different blues and "erased" paint in certain areas with a damp cloth to create a weathered worn-out look. I wasn't very scientific about it so the end result is perhaps not so "real" - just a nice rocking chair with fake old fading paint. Whilst painting the chair I found a very faded stamp underneath, I traced it onto paper and looked up the word "Malinche, Monterrey" on the wonderful all knowing internet. I found that the chair was from one of the pioneering furniture manufacturers in Mexico which specialized in rocking chairs and chairs of all kinds of woods (pine, mahogany, elm, ceder and beech). They closed down in the early 1970’s but the furniture is still very popular among collectors. After that I found the same rocking chair on a Mexican auction site price: $2,500. Hmm... I had already painted the chair by then and probably lowered the value by doing so, but if the new owner wants, I can restore it back to its former brown glory another day. Click on one picture to make it larger and see the before and after pictures. Caroline: A gift from the family was so badly smothered with dark dark varnish that the beautiful personality of this set of drawers was lost. I removed the varnish by sanding and the lumpy black paint off the drawer knobs by soaking them in vinegar and I found an amazing oak veneer underneath. I would have kept the oak veneer if it had been possible to get all the old varnish out of the wood grain but that proved impossible without damaging the veneer or using a lot of poisonous paint strippers - which I want to avoid. After undoing I then redid the body with 2 different colours of stain. For the drawers themselves I chose teak (a tropical hardwood) and for the body a black walnut stain which is a dark chocolate brown. I also stained the insides of the drawers and dressed the bottom of the drawers with moss green paper covered by a sheet of thick plastic. These can easily be removed so the drawer can be dusted and the plastic can be cleaned. Very practical and looks elegant in my opinion. I love how one now can see the wood grain through the stain, it looks so much more alive. What do you think? Click on a picture below to see full gallery of before and after photos: Linnea: Found a chair on the road, that someone thrown out because of some color stains on the seat . Except from the stains it was in an almost perfect condition. Here you can read about the transformation, step by step: 1. Sandpapered all sides of the seat. 2. Put insulating tape in the desired pattern on the wood. 3. Painted 2 layers of turquoise color and direct after the second layer, I took out the tape. 4. Painted the sides in black stain color + flax oil + vax. 5. Painted 1 layer of glossy varnish as a top coat and my work was finished!! For once the working process was easy and didn't take too long. YES! Linnea: Some weeks ago I bought three chairs in Kfar Truman, all of them were made around the 60's and in quite bad situation. Today I finished the redoing of my favorite one, a very bad painted wooden chair with loose back and loose legs. At least the bad painting made it very easy for me to take all the color off. From the beginning I really wanted to keep the chair with the original unpainted wood. But there were too many black stains, that I just could not get out. So I decided to try some of Caroline's home made stain color - black of course! And then I chose a beautiful textile designed by Ralph Lauren for the seat It is called "Native Orchid Floral- Batik" . The lower part of the chair's legs, I painted in dark bluish- green.. I am very happy with the result and maybe I will keep this one for my self. If you, who is reading this is interested in knowing what work lays behind
this product, so you are welcome to read about it here : 1. Remove old paint ( this time I was lucky since I could scrape it off with a knife) 2. Get out whatever that is not stuck from its place, like loose legs or back and sandpaper all very good, starting with a ruff paper and finishing with a gentle one. 3. Take out all that is stuck on the ends, can be a little tricky. And if you don´t do this, eventually what you glued back on, will fall off again! 4. Get the old seat out and all the 100 staples and nails........Sand paper all. 5. Glue all the pieces together again and make sure you attached them right - mark before with numbers because you WILL forget which stick is going in which hole. 6. Remove glue from all surfaces. 7. Paint the chair, at least 3 times no matter what paint you are using and remember to sandpaper in between with a fine paper! 8. In my case, I used stain color, 3 layers and after you need some kind of oil to bind the color to the wood and I used cold-pressed flax oil. 9. After 15-20 minutes you have to wipe the chair really good with a cotton rag. 10. Then you will need a furniture wax and I used Beeswax to cover all the wood with and after 15 minutes you have to rub it all in with a cotton cloth, really good! 11. After the chair is real dry, you can move on to the seat.......... but that´s another story and some more hours:-) Caroline: This little white cupboard or bedside table was covered in thick white paint. I removed the paint with my heat gun without wearing enough protection. THAT was a bad idea! The cupboard was probably last painted in the 60's and then it was very popular to put lead in paint. So after an hour of removing paint I had to spend 24 hours in bed with nausea and a head ache. I promise I will not do that again! Then I started redoing it, using an old book of poetry in Hebrew by the Israeli poet Tchernichovsky who is apparently considered to be a great poet - although everyone I have asked disagree. Anyhow the pages looked nice. The inside I painted red to match the sewing table and the door and front of the drawer I kept plain with linseed oil and beeswax - just because I felt there was just a bit too much poetry going on. I found red wheels and new knobs and that was that... sort of. I will not tell you the whole story of getting the right varnish by using 4 different products, have one of them explode in my face and another melt 6 layers of old varnish and nearly destroying the poetry and finally finding a Danish floor varnish (Thank you Scandinavia!) that costs a fortune but is just so perfect. That story would be much too long. I actually like this odd little cupboard. I wasn't so sure about it at first, but the next piece of furniture I redo will be normal and classic - I feel like being more plain. Click on a picture below to see gallery of before and after: Caroline: Some time ago I found a tiny wooden table in terrible shape at the flea market. Even though the wood was soaked in oil and layered with 5 layers of thick white paint, oh and a large crack all down the center - I bought it. I wanted something really cheap and not so nice because I wanted to cut the legs off and make it shorter. With a pretty or nicely designed table it would have hurt too much to put a saw to the legs. The reason I want it shorter, is that it will be my sewing table and the normal height of a table make my shoulders and neck hurt after five minutes of sewing. So first of all I had to remove all the paint and sandpaper for hours, then I decided on matching my little red chair. I kept the legs natural and only oiled them with parboiled linseed oil for that smooth satin texture that I love. Then I painted the top and the inside of the drawer red and the edge black just because I like contrast. In the end I decided on giving the table top that glass effect with 8 layers of high gloss varnish, just because I wanted to see if I could do it. I am probably going to regret it big time, since every tiny dust speck shines like a star in a red sky. But for now I am just please that it turned out so well. For a table of such low quality wood and bad shape I think it turned out very cute. I am very sorry I do not have more pictures of the table before the redoing. Check out the gallery of pictures below: Linnea:
After making the first seat cover to the yellow chair, I had some more pom pom´s left over . So I made a new seat of what there was, mixed small and big one´s. When I had finished it , I realized that I needed a stool to put it on. Me and Caroline went on a road trip two weeks ago and found alot of new and fun places of fleemarkets and secondhand stores. One of them was : סבתא מרים - איסוף ומכירת פריטי וינטאג' ( Grandma Miriam ) , where I found a perfect little stool, broken in the middle but easy to fix. And now the yellow has a new blue friend! Linnea: Found this wooden chair on he street in our village. My father helped me to restore it and to put it back together again. In the back of my head , I had a vision of a beautiful pom pom chair that I found on the internet : Of course my chair got the colour of lemon yellow and the pom pom´s, I sewed on to a felted fabric and then glued it to the seat. Here is the result, you can click on the pictures to enlarge.
Poisoning the wood worm beetle
Caroline: You might think I have died or gone to sleep since there have not been much progress with the renovation of furniture or on the blog. However that is not really the case. As I have said before it is very tedious to watch paint dry. And even though a chair might take 7 hours in actual work hours to REDO, if you count the amount of time I spend waiting for paint/glue to dry or trying to find an accessory it can in the end amount to many weeks. On top of that we are having the longest winter, it never stops raining AND my cat just had kittens. If you are frustrated - because I know that you are eagerly waiting for my next art piece :) - then believe me when I tell you that I am EXTREMELY frustrated. Here are some examples of what is going on. Click on a picture below to see enter the gallery of ongoing projects and read about my problems: |
Linnea & Caroline2 foreigners in Israel trying to find their space. Up-cycling furniture and clothes for a better environment and future. Check us out on Instagram:
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