Annie Sloan Chalk Paint

While I was participating in the One Room Challenge, I stumbled upon a tutorial while I was doing one of my daily blog readings.

 

Click on the picture and you'll be directed to the tutorial by The Yellow Cape Cod.

When I saw this picture-I knew I had to do this!  I'm not good at "seeing" things-so this only struck me because it was an actual color in my nursery. 

The distressed look was also perfect because that was the look I was going for in the details. 

The tutorial is a little complicated because chalk paint and antiquing wax were unknown concepts to me.  

I was looking all over for chalk board paint and only upon searching did I discover that chalk paint does not actually have anything to do with chalk. 

I think that would have been a nice thing to mention-it would have saved me a lot of confusion. 

Also-where can such paint be found?

It wasn't in the craft stores. 

So, more googling.  

I finally came across Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.

The beauty...

 

Thankfully, you can find vendors from their website.  

I opted to go to my local retailer with a swatch of wallpaper to ask their expertise as well as learn about this antiquing business.  

A long with the store employee, I picked the color Provence.

Luckily, the place where I went had samples on the floor of pieces with just the color and then comparative pieces with the antiquing wax.  

I then decided that I would skip the antiquing wax.  

The paint was a little more expensive than a regular gallon-which I was expecting.  

Anyway, I was all prepared to follow the tutorial on painting and sanding and painting again and sanding again, but then I realized that the frames I bought were not actually wood.  

I freaked out a little and wondered how this would all pan out.

Turns out, it worked to my advantage.  

Here are my frames after just one coat of chalk paint, then coated with clear wax.

All that natural distressing-happened on accident.  

When I began my first coat, I noticed that it wasn't exactly going on as it normally would.  

The only thing I can come up with is that because it's not actual wood-it wasn't being absorbed into the frame as it should have been.  

At first I was getting my panties in a wad-but then remembered something I read about distressing: it's not meant to be perfect.  

So, it was a blessing in disguise for a couple of reasons.  

I would have probably needed to do more than one coat.  Then I would have needed to wax, let it dry, sand it and then wax again.  

This time, all I had to do was let it dry-which was no small feat, which leads into my second reason.

Because of all the small grooves, I had to basically drench the area with paint because my paint brush couldn't actually get into all the small areas.  

When the paint was pooling and not drying quickly-I was able to get in there as best as I could and just move it around and it created more "distressing" marks-but it was all good!

It took about a day to dry-I placed it outside to help speed it along.

And then I did a layer of wax.  

The lady explained that putting on the wax was like putting on lotion.

Whatever that means.  

I figured it would be intuitive and I got to see some finished product so I knew what it should feel like.  

Either I didn't put enough wax on-because it still has that slightly rough feeling, which actually gives me chills just thinking about, or it was because of the frame not actually being wood that it wasn't able to achieve the look and feel.

However, they swear this paint is good on almost any surface, so it was probably something I did.  

I opted to leave it as is because this isn't a piece of furniture and no one is going to go up and  touch the frame.  

Annie Sloan paint has great colors, tons of ideas on how to mix the colors, and seems the easiest to use because you eliminate the step of priming.

I cannot wait to use this product again on a different project! 
You can chelk out Annie Sloan's channel on YouTube HERE