Oh my gosh you guys, this one has been around for a long time.
I purchased this clock more than 5 years ago. I paid $5 for it at a garage sale. It was going cheap because it didn’t work.
I mainly purchased it for the case. I planned to gut it and turn it into a little hanging display case of some kind.
But for some reason it became one of those projects that I never quite got around to sharing here on the blog. I did eventually remove the clock parts, and I sold some of them separately.
Then I asked Ken to add a little shelf inside the case. Next up, I painted it in Fusion’s Little Black Dress milk paint.
I added some Eiffel Tower paper to the back and filled it up with some clocks and silver salt and pepper shakers.
But I didn’t love it.
I think I just wasn’t feeling the black, and I also really wanted this piece to be crackled and chippy. But for some reason I didn’t get any chipping out of that black milk paint. So I tucked the clock case away for another couple of years. I finally decided to give it another go a few weeks ago.
But this time I also decided to try adding some heat. If you aren’t familiar with this technique, you can use a heat gun to dry your milk paint quickly which can promote crackling and/or chipping.
I had two shades of white on hand, Homestead House Sturbridge White and Fusion London Fog. The Sturbridge White is too white for me, but the London Fog is too creamy, so I mixed them to create the perfect off-white.
I mixed my paint up on the thicker side (because that tends to aid in crackling as well) and tested it out on the bottom part of the clock case. Once the paint was on, I hit it with the heat gun for a minute.
It started to crackle beautifully, so I turned off the heat gun and gave it a couple of minutes to dry.
And … well … you can see the results. It started chipping. A lot. Too much. Eventually almost all of the paint came off.
I suspect that’s because I had added a hemp oil topcoat over my black paint back when I first painted it (more than a year ago). Theoretically you can paint over hemp oil once it is cured, which takes about 4 weeks. That would probably work if I was using a chalk style paint, but not so much with a milk paint. Fusion recommends that you give hemp oil several months to cure before painting over it with their acrylic paint.
So back to the drawing board.
I had a couple of options at this point. I could remove the hemp oil using mineral spirits or rubbing alcohol. I could paint over the hemp oil with a chalk or acrylic paint first, and then follow that up with the milk paint. I could add bonding agent to my milk paint, but then I probably wouldn’t get the crackling that I do want. I could also try scuff sanding the clock to rough up the surface, I’ve had that work fairly well in the past. So I went with that approach.
Once I had it the clock case sanded down, I decided to thin out my milk paint a little too. Just to hedge my bets.
I repainted with two coats of the milk paint, and I still got quite a lot of chipping.
Too much chipping for you? I get it. This look isn’t for everyone, but I was creating this piece for myself and I still happen to love a chippy finish. So I decided to just go with it.
Rather than sanding the final coat of paint (which definitely would have taken even more of the paint off), I brushed it lightly with a dry cloth and then vacuumed away any really loose paint. Then I very gently brushed on three light coats of Dixie Belle’s Flat Clear Coat. It will act as a sort of ‘glue’ to hold the rest of my chippy paint in place. This will work on a piece that doesn’t get a lot of wear, but if it gets handled at all you’re still going to lose paint. In addition, the surface is very rough to the touch, so that’s something to keep in mind.
Now for the fun part! As I mentioned in my last post, this project was inspired by my visit to the Rijksmuseum and all of the fabulous miniatures that I saw there. I purchased three miniature ‘painting’ magnets in their gift shop including one of my favorite Vermeer, The Little Street.
And I needed somewhere to hang them.
I ordered some miniature wallpaper from the same Etsy vendor where I purchased the barn lights for my miniature barn makeover.
There were so many pretty ones to pick from that I had a hard time deciding. They were all less than $10 each, so I ordered three different ones to give myself options. I have already cut up the two I ended up using in the photo above. There is enough left of each that I could change my mind later and wallpaper both levels the same if I want to.
I used the Bradbury & Bradbury Wallflowers on the lower level
and the Bradbury & Bradbury Colonial Williamsburg on the top level.
Isn’t that fantastic?!
I also ordered an unpainted bench and chair from the same vendor.
The sliding door was from Hobby Lobby, and I ended up not being able to use it for this project. Also, I’m fairly sure the bench was not intended to arrive unassembled, it was broken. But it was fairly easy to glue it back together.
I painted the bench and the chair in Sweet Pickens’ In a Pickle milk paint.
And you’ll remember the little cupboard that I painted a few weeks back, I told you I had a plan for it.
After ‘wallpapering’ the ‘rooms’ and ‘hanging’ my ‘paintings’ with some two-sided tape, I furnished the two levels of my clock case.
They are a little sparsely decorated at the moment, but I figure I can always add to them as I find more fabulous miniatures that I want to include.
I had to hang the clock case out on my front porch to get decent lighting for these photos.
But its real home is hanging in my q branch where it looks amazing on my Globe Artichoke colored walls.
But you’ll just have to take my word for that.
I think it was worth the over 5 year wait to see this project come to fruition, what do you think?