I’m excited to tell you about my first experience with Milk Paint. I have been painting furniture with Chalk Paint for several years and I love it. But I decided it was time to try something new. Honestly I love the shabby chic look as well as the farm house style and Milk Paint fits the bill for both.
I have a booth at All Fixed Up in Lehi Utah where I sell my pieces and for a long time the store only sold Annie Sloan Chalk Paint and so we only painted pieces with ASCP. But several months ago the store started selling Sweet Pickins Milk Paint. So this week I brought home a sample of Sweet Pickins Sweetie Jane. This little shelf seemed the perfect candidate for a Milk Paint make over. Here’s the before picture.
I cleaned it up and started mixing the Milk Paint. It comes in a powder and needs to be mixed with equal parts water to powder. I read on the Sweet Pickins Furniture blog that warm water is best for mixing the paint.
This package had 2 oz of powder so I added 2 oz of water. This is my first try at Milk Paint so I wasn’t sure what to expect but it seemed a bit too thick to me so I added a few more drops of water until it felt like the right consistency to me. It went on smoothly and I was comfortable with how it was spreading so I went with that. The 2 oz covered this piece with one coat and I had just a small amount left. I only planned to put on one coat because I wanted this piece to have minimal coverage but I wouldn’t have had enough to do another coat if I had wanted to. This is what it looked like with one coat.
Like Chalk Paint, one coat does not completely cover. You can still see the brown finish showing through. I left the house for a few hours after painting this and when I got home it looked like this.
Lots of chippy goodness! 😃 I used a fine sandpaper and started lightly sanding. I’m going to tell you right now I didn’t do enough sanding. I will get to the wax I used in a moment but when I started waxing this I was getting a lot of paint chips still coming off. I think this piece may be unique in the sense that the original finish was chipping a lot. It was pulling off with the Milk Paint and by its self. Milk Paint has a way of deciding where it wants to stick and where it doesn’t want to stick. I will do another post on Milk Paint after I do another project with it and tell you how that one goes compared to this one. I’m curious to see how it will react on a different finish.
Anyhoo I resanded using a lot more pressure and a lot more of the Milk Paint came off. Which was what I wanted. 😊 There is a learning process with this paint just as there is with Chalk Paint. But both paints are very forgiving so mistakes are easy to fix.
There are a few different kinds of Finishes you can use over Milk Paint. Sweet Pickins has an oil wax and a cream wax and a few other finish product but for this I chose the cream wax. The oil wax has a mildly unpleasant smell that goes away once it’s applied and buffed but the cream wax smells like a mix or citrus and bubble gum. It goes on easy and smoothly and buffs off easily as well.
I used a lint free rag to put it on and buff it. I let it sit for 10-15 min before buffing it off. I was still getting some paint chips but for the most part it was the brown finish coming off. But after buffing the cream wax the paint was nice and smooth and beautiful. I let it sit for 24 hours to finish setting and I LOVE it! 😍 And no more chipping paint!
This looks like it came right out of an old farmhouse. I love that in some areas the paint chipped completely off. It makes this cute little shelf all sorts of interesting! I’m loving Sweet Pickins Milk Paint and I already bought more and am ready to try it on another piece. I will do another post soon and tell you more about this product and what I have learned about it. But I can tell you right now that you should try this yourself. This was really easy to use. There are lots of colors to chose from and I would suggest going to Sweet Pickins Furniture and see what she has to offer. I think I may try the oil wax on my next piece so I will share my experience with that as well.
Have you used Milk Paint before? Please leave a comment below and tell me your experience and I’d love your advice. If you have any questions about this or any of my other posts please leave a question in the comments.
Thanks for taking a look at my latest post! Hope you have a great day!
Cindy
